VOGONS


Reply 20 of 33, by yawetaG

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Of course, the real limitations of this project will be in the hardware you will likely run this on. On a 486 you'd be limited to a 10Mbit LAN connection at the fastest, while your text editor's speed will be further limited by the amount of memory it requires (and OS limitations). I also don't have very fond memories of using Win 3.x together with large files. Better build in some buffering capabilities...

Reply 22 of 33, by Bruninho

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Is this idea still going forward? I am curious 😀

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 23 of 33, by keenmaster486

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It's on my backlog-list of retro projects. I have the ability to program it so it's only a matter of time until I get started on it.

I wonder, though, whether it'd be better to try to use Open Watcom, or to use an old version of Visual C++. I'm thinking about efficiency here. It's gotta be efficient enough to run on a 486 or maybe even a 386 - after all, it's only going to be a text editor. I don't want it taking up any more memory than MS WordPad, for example. It'll be built for both 16-bit Windows 3.1x and 32-bit Windows 9x, if possible.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 24 of 33, by Bruninho

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keenmaster486 wrote:

It's on my backlog-list of retro projects. I have the ability to program it so it's only a matter of time until I get started on it.

I wonder, though, whether it'd be better to try to use Open Watcom, or to use an old version of Visual C++. I'm thinking about efficiency here. It's gotta be efficient enough to run on a 486 or maybe even a 386 - after all, it's only going to be a text editor. I don't want it taking up any more memory than MS WordPad, for example. It'll be built for both 16-bit Windows 3.1x and 32-bit Windows 9x, if possible.

Very good thoughts! I think you will be fine with Visual C++, never heard about Open Watcom (neither did my father, although he was more used to programming with Turbo Pascal than C++) and I, as a child learning programming 30 years ago, was playing with QBasic and Visual Basic. When Internet came, I turned my head to web design programming, much more interesting to me. Today I don’t even remember a line of QBasic, but my father, at the age of 60, still knows his old skills. Perhaps our generation isn’t that good...

Let me know if you need a hand or two when it comes to UI/UX for the editor! 😀

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 25 of 33, by keenmaster486

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Sure thing!

I also learned on QB and VB. I remember everything from QB, but nothing from Visual Basic 🤣
I used VB for DOS too, for a while.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 26 of 33, by Bruninho

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keenmaster486 wrote:

Sure thing!

I also learned on QB and VB. I remember everything from QB, but nothing from Visual Basic 🤣
I used VB for DOS too, for a while.

Can't believe there was VB for DOS! I just checked it on WinWorld... I had a laugh.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 27 of 33, by keenmaster486

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When I was a kid I tried to make a GUI using Visual Basic for DOS. It was pretty good-looking for a fake GUI. I called it "Windows 4.0", obviously trying very hard to be clever.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 28 of 33, by Bruninho

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keenmaster486 wrote:

When I was a kid I tried to make a GUI using Visual Basic for DOS. It was pretty good-looking for a fake GUI. I called it "Windows 4.0", obviously trying very hard to be clever.

Lol! Good one. When I was a kid I created a fake GUI for an ATM using QBasic.

It was pretty funny except for one tiny detail...

There was no money to take! Hahahaha

I don’t think I have it saved somewhere - I found a lot of old diskettes, but I don’t remember saving it to a diskette. I think its lost 🙁

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 29 of 33, by Bruninho

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Any updates? I’m very curious to see your retro projects 😀

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 30 of 33, by keenmaster486

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Well, life interferes - it's still on the list. I'm looking into maybe using Visual Basic 3 to make it, the reason being that the word on the street is VB3 produces some pretty good executables while VB4,5,6,etc. produce bloated ones with bigger runtime libraries, etc. It would be a 16-bit program but I'm not sure if that really matters, does it? Makes for better compatibility as it would work with Windows 3.1, 9x, XP, etc. all the way up to current 32-bit versions of Windows.

Including a built-in terminal and FTP server, though, would be the hardest part. There are some VBX extensions for VB3 that let you do TCP/IP sockets, so I have to dive into writing custom network code 😒

I would rather build this program with something else other than VB - specifically I'd really like to use Open Watcom, but there's no easy way to build a GUI app with OW.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 31 of 33, by Bruninho

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keenmaster486 wrote:

Well, life interferes - it's still on the list. I'm looking into maybe using Visual Basic 3 to make it, the reason being that the word on the street is VB3 produces some pretty good executables while VB4,5,6,etc. produce bloated ones with bigger runtime libraries, etc. It would be a 16-bit program but I'm not sure if that really matters, does it? Makes for better compatibility as it would work with Windows 3.1, 9x, XP, etc. all the way up to current 32-bit versions of Windows.

Including a built-in terminal and FTP server, though, would be the hardest part. There are some VBX extensions for VB3 that let you do TCP/IP sockets, so I have to dive into writing custom network code 😒

I would rather build this program with something else other than VB - specifically I'd really like to use Open Watcom, but there's no easy way to build a GUI app with OW.

Good thoughts, better go with VB3. I have never been a fan of using bigger libraries. Sometimes here at work I hate when the node_modules folder grows up massively on some projects I do, it's quite disgusting. We went to the moon with 4KB, we also squeezed a Super Mario Bros game into a 40kb cartridge! Since when the programmers started to use HUGE libraries to do small tasks?

Have you found some interesting read on these extensions? I almost could remember when me and my dad wrote a very small app similar to WinPopup with VB back in these days.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 32 of 33, by Jo22

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root42 wrote:

I think this would be an exercise in futility. The system requirements on non-trivial git repositories are huge, and git is written as a conglomerate
of bash scripts, C code and other bits, that porting it to DOS would be a nightmare. Better to use a network share and have ANY modern machine (maybe a Pi?)
communicate with github and the network share represent the source code that you want to edit on your DOS machine.

Hmm. Sounds like it would be easier/more practicable to port bash and a Posix like subsystem to Win16/32 or DOS.
Or create a minimalistic Linux/BSD VM that runs directly atop Win16/32s.

Edit:

keenmaster486 wrote:
Well, life interferes - it's still on the list. I'm looking into maybe using Visual Basic 3 to make it, the reason being that th […]
Show full quote

Well, life interferes - it's still on the list. I'm looking into maybe using Visual Basic 3 to make it,
the reason being that the word on the street is VB3 produces some pretty good executables while VB4,5,6,etc. produce bloated ones with bigger runtime libraries, etc
It would be a 16-bit program but I'm not sure if that really matters, does it? Makes for better compatibility as it would work with Windows 3.1, 9x, XP, etc. all the way
up to current 32-bit versions of Windows.

Including a built-in terminal and FTP server, though, would be the hardest part. There are some VBX extensions for VB3 that let you do TCP/IP sockets
so I have to dive into writing custom network code 😒

I would rather build this program with something else other than VB - specifically I'd really like to use Open Watcom, but there's no easy way to build a GUI app with OW.

VB3 -along with VB1- was very popular in the day, indeed. Lot's of VBX files should work with it.
VB2 was fine, too, but was superseded very quickly by VB3. VB4 is also worth a try, since it includes a 16-Bit version that still supports VBX.
Other programs of the time that I remember: Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.x aka Borland Pascal 7 Windows, Delphi 1-3, DBFast, Profan, Visual REXX (OS/2), HyperCard (Mac).

Edit: Also worth a look is https://virtuallyfun.com/.
That site contains quite a few articles/experiments in respect of vintage computing/programming.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 33 of 33, by root42

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Oh dear! Profan by Roland G. Hülsmann! That guy single handedly established major parts of the German shareware scene. Oh boy. I wonder what he's up to nowadays?

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