gerry wrote on 2024-12-05, 09:24:

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-04, 23:51:

Thirty years ago, you wanted to send a photo to your grandmother, you went to the store, bought film, put it in your camera, took the photos, went back to the store, dropped the film for processing, came back to the store, picked up your prints, went to the post office, got an envelope and a stamp, put the photo in it, and mailed it. Depending on how fast the photos got processed and how far away your grandmother lives, you're looking at a month-long process. And some significant costs, plus 3 trips to the photo store plus one trip to the post office. Today, take the picture on your smartphone, hit the 'send to' button, pick your grandmother, and unless she lives in North Korea or something, 10 seconds later, the photo turns up on her smartphone and she can do all kinds of things with it. Including, say, being a proud grandma who sends the photo to all her friends!

sometimes i have to stop and remember such things were *only* 30 years ago and that in no way did the world feel old or slow back then, even though the internet/www was starting up in earnest. the differences between 1990 and 1999 are huge, i think more than any comparable decade in terms of global communications anyway

There were alternatives, though.

a) Get a Kodak Photo CD with your pictures and send the PCD files to your friends (or whole CD).
Photo CDs were available in ca. 1992, along with CD-i. Many Players and game consoles could read them.

b) Use a Polaroid camera, get an instant photo and use your handy scanner to read them.
My father had a handy scanner since 1988, running on a 286 PC with Hercules graphics. The scans are still on the backup floppies.
He had used a scanning application and Dr. Halo III, I think.

If you have the scans on your HDD, you could send messages with attachments to your friends.

a) By using e-mail over internet/X.25 networks(CompuServe was popular as an e-mail provider since the 1980s; e-mails used to be numerical).
b) By using a national online service (Minitel, BTX etc).
Here in my place, T-Online software on Windows/Mac had allowed attaching pictures/files to private messages (not internet based network).
c) By using Packet-Radio network. Hams had sent files over long distance since the 1980s.

Edit: Handy scanners were available to many platforms, even the C64 (ScannTronik sold some; Handyscanner 64 comes to mind)!
By using a modem, the picture files could he exchanged with others via phone line.

Edit: Personally, I've owned a handy scanner in 1995/96 or so. Made by Mustek, I think.
Used it on my 286 PC running Windows 3.1. The technology was there, just not so mainstream yet.
I don’t understand why people overrate modern tech so much. I was satisfied with the technology of the 90s already. If only ISDN had made it word wide.

Oh, speaking of ISDN.. There's also telefax, of course. You could send pictures to others via fax, of course!
How could I forget!? Back in the 90s, colour fax was rather new.
Computer to computer communication supported colour fax quite easily, if the right software was used.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-05, 18:22:

There were alternatives, though.

a) Get a Kodak Photo CD with your pictures and send the PCD files to your friends (or whole CD).
Photo CDs were available in ca. 1992, along with CD-i. Many Players and game consoles could read them.

Now I'm imagining Grandma trying to feed the photo CD of the grandkids into her front loading NES. Her Sega Saturn won't arrive until Christmas and she's getting impatient.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-05, 18:22:

I don’t understand why people overrate modern tech so much. I was satisfied with the technology of the 90s already. If only ISDN had made it word wide.

I feel very similarly. I would be perfectly satisfied to have technology freeze in the early 90s. That's not to say that things like solid state storage wouldn't be appreciated, but capacities would remain similar to 90s-era hard disks. "The Future", but with a very Blade Runner-esque feel. They still used CRTs and optical media in that vision of the future.

Pentium power.
Sound blasters.
CD ROM drives.
Plug n Play OSs was clearly a vision on what was to come.
GPUs
SSDs, but I remember thinking they would be PCIe based cards not what we have now, and didnt think we would get the 2.5" drives we ended up getting for many years. we were mugged off there.

Great topic. Here is my list:

IBM PC XT clone at my fathers workplace. (before that there was an ancient CPM OS based computer, probably from 70s) First real computer graphics, Games like Airborne Ranger and Death Track
VGA monitor, with all those wonderful colors.
Soundblaster 2.0 My friend bought it and i remember first thing we tried was playing wolf3d with real sound. After that there was no turning back, i was addicted to computers.
BBS-ing, dial up internet. Suddenly "whole world" was on my PC
CD-Rom. A true spacesaver (my PC-s HDD was only 40Mb back in 1994)
Voodoo cards, 1 and 2
ATI TV tuner. Now I have my own futuristic TV set on my room.
Logitech formula Force steering wheel
3d Glasses. Actually with these quite cheap glasses came an mindblowing demo, where cubes and spheres were floating around and i literally tried to catch these 😁 Gaming experience was not so impressive and i sold these things soon.
Gaming with 3 monitor (ATI eyefinity setup). Still use similar setup and i cant understand why people use these kinda small gaming monitors.
SSD hard drives. The speed bump was really impressive.

Sadly after mid 2000s there have not been many significant futuristic experiences.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-12-05, 17:46:

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-04, 23:51:

- Windows 2000. First OS that didn't need reboots every couple of days, if not earlier.

🤣.
Unix - and other *real* operating systems - didn't need frequent reboots since like forever, or actually since there came CPUs with memory protection.

Yes. And... frankly, you couldn't run UNIX on a teenager's budget and with a teenager's constraints (e.g. parents also being able to use the computer productively) in the 1990s. Maybe in the late 1990s you could play with FreeBSD/Linux at home a little bit if you had an extra machine floating around somehow... or if you somehow had an exceptionally roomy hard drive (all of mine were full running just one OS), you could maybe experiment with a dual boot.

What real operating systems could run on home/school-priced hardware in the 1990s? And run the software library home/school users wanted to run? Effectively none - the options were classic Mac OS (great GUI, dreadful memory management, dreadful stability), Windows 95/98 (passable memory management, a habit of running out of system resources very quickly), and... that was about it.

Even Windows NT prior to 2000 was not an option. Not with its RAM requirements and RAM prices in 1996.

I'm sure an IBM ESA/390 or AS/400 or a VAX or a SPARC box running SunOS 4.x would have delivered amazing reliability. But... ummm... unless your dad worked at Bell Labs, that wasn't exactly achievable.

So I stand by my view - for a home/school/office user with a hardware budget under $3000+CAD (or even under $10000CAD - I think everything with a real OS other than NT would have had five figure price tags, but an NT x86 box would have been a lot cheaper), Windows 2000 was the first practical, affordable OS that didn't require frequent reboots. OS X would come along a few years later.

And more importantly, to go back to the premise of the OP's question - what was mind blowing about Windows 2000 is you could run the same software on the same hardware that would cause 98SE to run out of resources and need a reboot in an hour and... Windows 2000 would just take it and not require a reboot until you needed to install patches (and back then there wasn't a monthly patch tuesday yet). You go from managing your multitasking carefully to avoid draining your system resources within a few hours to... 6+ week uptimes and never having to worry about resources again.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-05, 18:22:

The technology was there, just not so mainstream yet.

And that's a big part of the point. Yes, if you were older and/or had the good fortune of having a parent who worked in technology and was willing to spend the insane amount of money that innovative computer stuff cost in the late 1980s/early 1990s, lots of technology was there.

But you were talking about scanners, for example. The hand scanner, as far as I can tell, only existed because flatbed scanners were insanely expensive.

I was trying to google the price of scanners and figured Apple's OneScanner would be easier to google. Can't find the pricing for the early models. Found a NYT article that talks about US$599 for a colour model in 1996.

By the late late 1990s, you could get a flatbed scanner for like $80.

This stuff was just... not approchable in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Now, here is what is interesting. $599 today is US$1200 adjusted for inflation in 2024.

For $1200USD, you can go down to the same Apple and buy an iPhone 16 Pro Max today. For the price of a flatbed scanner in 1996, you get:
- a portable computer with 6 cores going up to 4GHz, 8GB of RAM running a *NIX derivative OS.
I don't know how to get data that attempts to compare performance to 1996' flagships, but you're looking at big systems. Maybe not supercomputer big...
- 256 gigs of storage.
- multi-hundred-megabit/sec wireless networking. (How much did 100 megabit/sec FDDI or maybe early 802.3u Fast Ethernet cost in 1996? And I don't know what the options for faster than that might have been?)
- wireless Internet connectivity that's above OC3 speeds, maybe even OC12+ speeds. How much did an OC3 Internet circuit cost in 1996? All of Canada probably connected to the Internet on the equivalent of an OC3 or two in 1996...
- a cellular phone
- a digital camera that will take dramatically better pictures than any digital camera (or probably analog camera) in 1996
- a digital camera that can take photos of documents that will be better quality than the scans from that flatbed scanner
- a music player that can potentially access infinite quantities of music
- a portable gaming console
- a colour screen with more pixels than the highest-end CRTs of 1996

Really, for the price of a flatbed scanner in 1996, you can now get computing power and connectivity that would have required a NASA or Bell Labs or whatnot sized budget. 8GB of RAM in 1996? That'd be hundreds of thousands of dollars at least. 256 gigs of storage? Oh look, the Jaz drive launched in 1996 - $99USD per gigabyte, so that's $25,000 for 256 gigs. And that's offline removable storage - if you wanted to have your 256 gigs permanently accessible, I don't know how much that would cost. And you can go down to your nearest wireless carrier and buy 200GB of Internet data at OC12+ speeds for $60CAD/month... and connect to the Internet with a SIM card the size of a fingernail rather than a half a rack of equipment.

So basically, for the price of a flatbed scanner, 28 years later, you now get a whole number of home devices (music player, gaming console, cellular phone, camera, etc) and the computing power of a half-million-dollar+ facility and more connectivity than a giant organization... in your pocket. And you can run it on battery for half a day and charge it with a 20W USB charger.

And when I say half a million dollars, I might be two orders of magnitude too low. Some person in Reddit three months ago claimed that a modern iPhone has twice the computing power of a $55 million USD supercomputer from 1997. I have no idea what they base that on... (and I'm not going to spend another 20 minutes trying to find supercomputer to iPhone benchmark data that I couldn't find so far.)

That's the power of Moore's law. And economies of scale. And that's what makes that technology available to the ordinary grandmother...

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-05, 23:44:

And more importantly, to go back to the premise of the OP's question - what was mind blowing about Windows 2000 is you could run the same software on the same hardware that would cause 98SE to run out of resources and need a reboot in an hour and... Windows 2000 would just take it and not require a reboot until you needed to install patches (and back then there wasn't a monthly patch tuesday yet). You go from managing your multitasking carefully to avoid draining your system resources within a few hours to... 6+ week uptimes and never having to worry about resources again.

Windows 98 can run out of memory from something as simple as opening and closing Notepad one too many times. I don't know what the issue is but there is an unresolved memory problem that I encountered in testing that I was never able to solve. This is probably the origin of many of the seemingly random instability and crashes that this operating system was known for when not rebooted often enough.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/183777-how-to-de … n-windows-9xme/

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-04, 14:19:

Early 90s, used a hypertext document for first time, thought that was "really something" then it just seemed natural on a web browser when I tried that in 93ish.

I remember magazine CDs in those days would often come with entire websites on them, so people with no internet access could browse them offline. This was my introduction to the WWW. Netscape Navigator was the main browser in those days.

Tripredacus wrote on 2024-12-04, 20:34:

There was some point in the mid 2000s when there was an uptake in the installation or deployment of undersea cables that made it so it was actually possible to access websites outside of the US. Prior to this it was extremely slow or impossible to access a site from Japan for example. I do not know the exact time this change happened (and Bard doesn't know either) but this really opened up the internet.

Someone mentioned Team Fortress upthread. I played that a lot. I remember there was a Russian kid with a ping of 800 who would regularly play on our server. Engineer of course.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-05, 18:22:

There were alternatives, though. […]
Show full quote

There were alternatives, though.

a) Get a Kodak Photo CD with your pictures and send the PCD files to your friends (or whole CD).
Photo CDs were available in ca. 1992, along with CD-i. Many Players and game consoles could read them.

b) Use a Polaroid camera, get an instant photo and use your handy scanner to read them.
My father had a handy scanner since 1988, running on a 286 PC with Hercules graphics. The scans are still on the backup floppies.
He had used a scanning application and Dr. Halo III, I think.

there were indeed other ways of doing it. VivienM explains better than i could about the costs, amazing how expensive "things" were back then really, something lost on many commentators about costs now.

I remember early digital cameras, one with a floppy disk in it!

i also remember scanners back to the 1980's, the scanned image was generally a greyscale pixelated image like a hazy worn old photo, but it was still impressive (at the time). Or sometimes there was no actual grey scale, just larger and closer dots for "dark" and smaller more dispersed dots for "lighter"! I think their application better suited line drawings or at last where contrast was high. These were specialised expensive tools at the time, not genuinely without use as any budget smart phone with the most basic camera will not, if held still, take a better digital image of something - an no need to "scan"

the only scanning application i see commonly still is in the multi function printers in offices, where its possible to scan images and letters on the rare occasions its needed (mostly sales people scanning receipts for expense claims! and even then they now just take photos and load/email direct )

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-05, 06:14:

I'm now speccing 256GB configurations for some new home servers. Incredible.

640GB ought to be enough for everybody.

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-06, 00:30:

And that's a big part of the point. Yes, if you were older and/or had the good fortune of having a parent who worked in technolo […]
Show full quote

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-05, 18:22:

The technology was there, just not so mainstream yet.

And that's a big part of the point. Yes, if you were older and/or had the good fortune of having a parent who worked in technology and was willing to spend the insane amount of money that innovative computer stuff cost in the late 1980s/early 1990s, lots of technology was there.

But you were talking about scanners, for example. The hand scanner, as far as I can tell, only existed because flatbed scanners were insanely expensive.

I was trying to google the price of scanners and figured Apple's OneScanner would be easier to google. Can't find the pricing for the early models. Found a NYT article that talks about US$599 for a colour model in 1996.

By the late late 1990s, you could get a flatbed scanner for like $80.

This stuff was just... not approchable in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Now, here is what is interesting. $599 today is US$1200 adjusted for inflation in 2024.

For $1200USD, you can go down to the same Apple and buy an iPhone 16 Pro Max today. For the price of a flatbed scanner in 1996, you get:
- a portable computer with 6 cores going up to 4GHz, 8GB of RAM running a *NIX derivative OS.
I don't know how to get data that attempts to compare performance to 1996' flagships, but you're looking at big systems. Maybe not supercomputer big...
- 256 gigs of storage.
- multi-hundred-megabit/sec wireless networking. (How much did 100 megabit/sec FDDI or maybe early 802.3u Fast Ethernet cost in 1996? And I don't know what the options for faster than that might have been?)
- wireless Internet connectivity that's above OC3 speeds, maybe even OC12+ speeds. How much did an OC3 Internet circuit cost in 1996? All of Canada probably connected to the Internet on the equivalent of an OC3 or two in 1996...
- a cellular phone
- a digital camera that will take dramatically better pictures than any digital camera (or probably analog camera) in 1996
- a digital camera that can take photos of documents that will be better quality than the scans from that flatbed scanner
- a music player that can potentially access infinite quantities of music
- a portable gaming console
- a colour screen with more pixels than the highest-end CRTs of 1996

Really, for the price of a flatbed scanner in 1996, you can now get computing power and connectivity that would have required a NASA or Bell Labs or whatnot sized budget. 8GB of RAM in 1996? That'd be hundreds of thousands of dollars at least. 256 gigs of storage? Oh look, the Jaz drive launched in 1996 - $99USD per gigabyte, so that's $25,000 for 256 gigs. And that's offline removable storage - if you wanted to have your 256 gigs permanently accessible, I don't know how much that would cost. And you can go down to your nearest wireless carrier and buy 200GB of Internet data at OC12+ speeds for $60CAD/month... and connect to the Internet with a SIM card the size of a fingernail rather than a half a rack of equipment.

So basically, for the price of a flatbed scanner, 28 years later, you now get a whole number of home devices (music player, gaming console, cellular phone, camera, etc) and the computing power of a half-million-dollar+ facility and more connectivity than a giant organization... in your pocket. And you can run it on battery for half a day and charge it with a 20W USB charger.

And when I say half a million dollars, I might be two orders of magnitude too low. Some person in Reddit three months ago claimed that a modern iPhone has twice the computing power of a $55 million USD supercomputer from 1997. I have no idea what they base that on... (and I'm not going to spend another 20 minutes trying to find supercomputer to iPhone benchmark data that I couldn't find so far.)

That's the power of Moore's law. And economies of scale. And that's what makes that technology available to the ordinary grandmother...

Um, okay. Yes, my father was in IT, actually. He wasn't rich, though.
He rather was "too poor for bad tools", so to say.
That's why he had a Sharp MZ series computer running CP/M and an IBM PC and not, say, a C64.
He required the computers as tools, for programming and communication and so on.
Also, he had to sell them once in a while when business wasn't going well. 🙁

And in my case, I've used my humble 286 for learning, for discovering the world.
The shareware CDs I bought with my pocket money were a substitute to surfing the world wide web at the time, a substitute for playing outside with other kids/teens of the day.

You have to know, back then the kids in my neighborhood liked to play soccer or in the mud. sigh.
They weren't the intellectual, thoughtful or sensitive kind of kids who built crystal radios, had a chemical construction kit or who lovingly cared about their pets or something.

Nope. They were the wild ones. Running, beating, screaming.
Worshipping the local soccer club and wearing soccer fan shirts, impersonating their soccer idol on the medow (playfield) not far away.
They were the embarassment for any boy with a sense for wonder of nature or culture.
There also were unfriendly neighbors around (plus a few older, lovely ones).

So my dad worried a lot about me and wanted me not to wander around all day.
That must have been the main motivationen why I had various toys, such as both a NES and a SNES (and a Gameboy).

The NES was a second-hand model, though. We got it used.
At the beginning, I had just one game. SMB1. I got more in the following years.
The SNES was an exception, though, it was new. Got it for birthday or christmas, I think.

The reason I got it was the bundled Super Gameboy, mainly, so I could play the existing games on a monitor. An old, beige Commodore 1702 from the early 1980s.
I suppose my father was annoyed by the high battery consumption of the Gameboy, so he got me this kit when he saw it.

But back to the PC.. The CD-ROM and soundcard were a multimedia kit, the 4MB of RAM a necessity to run Windows 3.1 and applications without virtual memory.
The handy scanner and the HP LaserJet were used for school works, too.

Sure, it seems like hot-rod, but the PC was an elderly lady, really.
It was made in 1988, before re-union, had an on-board VGA with 256KB of basic video RAM and a bus mouse interface.

It wasn't capable of running DOS4GW extender games or simulating EMS.
Chipset must have been an early HT12, I assume.

But it was capable of handling the common media formats, dialing into proprietary online services or BBS/Mailbox systems.
Was a fun time. There was a mailbox list on the last pages in "BTX Magazin".

That being said, I always had to be careful when using the telephone.
My father was afraid of high phone bills, so I kept my online voyages rather short.

When I had to do research for school projects, writing essays and so on, I've had to visit an internet café.

It was better that way, probably, anyway.
The cyber café/internet café had fast internet connection and surfing the internet on a 386DX-40 wasn't exactly a pleasure to begin with.

And on my own 286-12, I couldn't go into the internet, at all.
The farest I could reach was the proprietary part of each provider.

The CompuServe forums (GO something, via WinCIM) or T-Online's BTX service (CEPT pages, KIT pages).
The web browsers for Windows 3.1 were all 32-Bit applications, unfortunately.

Anyway, I'm grateful I had been there. Even though I sometimes regret on missing out a lot, still.
(Reminds me of that saying that it's better to experience something and see it go away, rather than never having experienced it to begin with.)

Looking back, I sometimes think I should have encouraged my father to go online more often. If I only was more energic here, sigh.
Maybe then he'd met friends or similar-minded folks online, maybe and hadn't felt so alone at the time.

But there was this fear about loosing money all time - or about loss in general, which held us back so often.
Worrying about money and avoid taking risks was what did cost us the most precious, happiness and lifetime here on earth.

Errius wrote on 2024-12-06, 07:33:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-04, 14:19:

Early 90s, used a hypertext document for first time, thought that was "really something" then it just seemed natural on a web browser when I tried that in 93ish.

I remember magazine CDs in those days would often come with entire websites on them, so people with no internet access could browse them offline. This was my introduction to the WWW. Netscape Navigator was the main browser in those days.

Didn't Windows 3.0 have a hypertext help early on? In 1990/1991?
I remember that it was more sophisticated than the one in Windows 3.1x.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-06, 10:52:

Didn't Windows 3.0 have a hypertext help early on? In 1990/1991?
I remember that it was more sophisticated than the one in Windows 3.1x.

Do you mean .HLP files?

.hlp files lasted well into the Win95, possibly even 98 era before they were replaced by .chm. If Win3.0 had something else (edit: I checked, and it's using .hlp) then I don't remember it - just lots of plain- and .wri text files, none of them hyper in any way.

Errius wrote on 2024-12-06, 07:33:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-04, 14:19:

Early 90s, used a hypertext document for first time, thought that was "really something" then it just seemed natural on a web browser when I tried that in 93ish.

I remember magazine CDs in those days would often come with entire websites on them, so people with no internet access could browse them offline. This was my introduction to the WWW. Netscape Navigator was the main browser in those days.

That was 95-96-97, Netscape was yet to be born in 93, main browsers were Cello, Mosaic, I don't think cover CDs were seen until '94 or so either.

Speaking of browsers. Opera - back when it wasn't just some chrome on top of Chromium - had a plethora of great, forward looking features. Rendering HTML while it's being loaded, instead of only when an entire file has finished downloading? Now everybody's doing it this way. Spatial keyboard navigation? Hell yes - I still miss that one. Oh and here's integrated, lean news, mail and bittorrent clients too (though Netscape might've also had those, not sure). [edit: and I completely forgot it had popup blocker. Thanks for the reminder, ElectroSoldier.]

And that reminded me of using operamail.com - until eventually I got an invite for Gmail. Now there's another "future moment". Room for entire GB's worth of mail! Going from cleaning out your mails every so often, deciding what to keep and what no to, to just hitting "archive" and leveraging being able to search through your entire catalog of conversations? Now that was a paradigm change. Another part of it was the switch from POP3 to IMAP (which few mail hosts offered), which made things much more convenient when using a dedicated client instead of Webmail.

Firebird had more of an effect on browsing than anything else. It was because of that you got Chrome.
Firebird gave us tabs, blocking popups and an interface you could customise. Before Firebird it always looked and worked the same... ie. IE.

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-05, 23:44:

What real operating systems could run on home/school-priced hardware in the 1990s? And run the software library home/school users wanted to run? Effectively none - the options were classic Mac OS (great GUI, dreadful memory management, dreadful stability), Windows 95/98 (passable memory management, a habit of running out of system resources very quickly), and... that was about it.

Even Windows NT prior to 2000 was not an option. Not with its RAM requirements and RAM prices in 1996.

Windows NT 4.0 workstation was $200? When we ran it, it was on pentium machines, I believe we installed 32mb to make it run comfortably. The biggest issue was software availability or compatibility. Not great for home users at release, but small business could throw together a machine pretty easy because cost of the base computer wasn't an issue. We liked it, and it was an easy "entry" to a stable OS. There already existed a second option in linux, but of course, software considerations were worse, unless you were a programmer at that time. Before '95, there really wasn't any. DOS was king before then. (Sorry OS/2, you never reached your potential)

Yes, the NT project / Win32 was kind of a "future arrived" in the 90s as it improved 9x and eventually fully converted to the NT kernel.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-06, 11:22:

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-06, 10:52:

Didn't Windows 3.0 have a hypertext help early on? In 1990/1991?
I remember that it was more sophisticated than the one in Windows 3.1x.

Do you mean .HLP files?

Hi, yes! ^^

They're compiled help files that pre-date *.CHM help files introduced in ~Win98 (they're HTML based).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp

elszgensa wrote on 2024-12-06, 11:57:

.hlp files lasted well into the Win95, possibly even 98 era before they were replaced by .chm. If Win3.0 had something else (edit: I checked, and it's using .hlp) then I don't remember it - just lots of plain- and .wri text files, none of them hyper in any way.

They're not HTML yet, but have hyperlinks. They're hyperbooks, so to say.
You can click on underline text parts (usually green; black on post-256c video drivers) and get to another page or have a "pop-up" window.

"Buried within the host of files Microsoft Windows dumps on a hard drive is a hypertext book reader.
Every time a user encounters a problem in an application and taps "F1" for help, they call the Windows Help engine.
This simple hypertext system allows navigation using links (reference, note, or command), a simple search function (using keywords), or a default path.
Bookmarks and history are provided. Graphics (BMP, DIB, WMF) may contain multiple anchors.
The interface is that of Windows itself--multiple scrolling windows."

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0149.html

I know that this may not suit our definition of "hyper" anymore, but there was a time in which hyperlinks hadn't been exclusive to HTML.
For example, there was HyperCard on Mac of the 80s or early CD-ROM based encyclopedia using a hypertext system.

The Windows 3.0 WinHelp differed from Windows 3.1 counterpart insofar that it looked more than an actual hyperbook system.

Here are some more examples:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/ … yperlinks-blue/

Edit: Several "online help" systems fund in programs such as Quick Basic or MS-DOS do feature links of some sort, too.
Not sure if they're document readers/browsers in that sense, though. 🤷‍♂️

Oh, I did not mean to say "hlp files are not hypertext" - sorry if you read it that way. Plaintext and wri files aren't. hlp are kinda-sorta rtf files under the hood, divided into "pages" of sorts (so you don't see the entire file at once) and jump marks linking between those pages (plus an index/TOC). You can't jump to an entirely different file iirc, but imho they're definitely "hypertexty" enough to qualify.

So you say 3.0 and 3.1's help files are (mostly?) the same format, yet behave differently, somehow? Interesting, I didn't know that. Something to look into over the holidays.