Off topic, but the other day people were wondering why Microsoft did users stayed on the platform when operating systems like the Amiga, Mac and even NeXT existed and it was because the terminal user interface is good enough for many people.
Great work by the author. I really like hearing about extending the lifespans of DOS applications.
The way I remember it was that people often did use other platforms but Microsoft won largely because IBM lost control of the PC market allowing for hundreds of cheap clones.
It wasn’t until the mid 90s when PCs started to feel like the more capable platform.
It’s also worth noting that there is a reason Microsoft offers heavy subsidies for education: it’s because if you indoctrinate people into your platform early on then they’re likely to keep buying your platform for years to come because change is scary.
Edit: just to add some context, this is the point of view from England. Sounds like Apple had (and possibly still has?) a bigger presence in schools in the US. Whereas over here Apple machines were relatively uncommon compared to many of their counterparts.
> It’s also worth noting that there is a reason Microsoft offers heavy subsidies for education: it’s because if you indoctrinate people into your platform early on then they’re likely to keep buying your platform for years to come because change is scary.
That was Apple in the tail end of the 70's and 80's. Just about all grade schools where I am had Apple ]['s and few to no PC's. Apple heavily discounted the hardware and software for education. It was the same through Jr. High and High school (graduated in '90), except by then we had Mac's in the school "labs." As a kid and teenager, I didn't even know there was an IBM or Microsoft until the 90's. Everything was Apple in education. I was heartbroken to receive a 386sx/16 for my graduation present as I was heading off to software engineering in college. Until I got to college and hardly anyone had Apple's and the whole college was IBM clones.
I had a similar experience in the early 90s (II followed by 68K Macs (LCIIs) and a few molar macs), but by '98 (HS for me) they were buying pallets full of Gateway and Dell desktops which gradually replaced the Mac labs.
My guess on causes in no particular order:
1. Apple got stingier in the discounting
2. They faced more aggressive competition from PC vendors and weren't willing to eat any additional margin by increasing their subsidy
3. What I suspect is the case: Schools looked around, compared Windows 95 vs Mac OS 7 and 8, looked at Apple's business marketshare (nil) and their shrinking consumer marketshare, and concluded Apple was lost in the wilderness and teaching kids to use Macs was pointless. Even as an Apple admirer at the time (couldn't afford one though) I can understand the decision.
Are you American? Macs were much less common in Europe and particularly in England. In fact England had its own educational computer in the 80s as a venture between then BBC and Acorn, the company that invented the original ARM CPUs.
Which was funny to me because it wasn't until well past 2000 that any of my educational systems were Windows; grade school was Apple IIs and early Macs (one was color!) and high school had higher end Macs.
Cheap clones able to run 1-2-3 was a big part of it, but the real lightning bolt for everyone I knew was Windows 95 and the Internet. And most of the kids I knew would push their parents towards the Windows for the games.
In U.K. it was really common for people to have 8-bit micros even into the late 80s. Typically Amstrad and Commodores (with machines from Sinclair before that) while schools had BBC Micros (from Acorn). Though there was a plethora of machines around at that time that most people have since forgotten about, like the Dragon 32 / 64.
Europe, and the U.K. particularly, had a really strong computer hardware industry in those days. In fact France has the Minitel which is itself a really fascinating technology and shaped early French computing trends in a differ way to England and USA too.
Going back to the U.K., you’d see a few people, usually people with a little more money, but Atari or Amiga machines but more often people jumped from C64 or Amstrad CPC micro computers to IBM-compatible PCs. There definitely were people who had an Apple Mac, but it wasn’t the norm where I lived.
Showing my age a little here, but my high school still ran Windows 3.x (I don’t think it was even 3.1. Pretty sure it was 3.0 on 286s). It was all Microsoft Office too. I ran Lotus at home but Microsoft Word and Excel had already conquered the schools, at least from what I saw. But we had Corel Draw instead of PowerPoint. Not sure why. Maybe PowerPoint hadn’t been released yet?
I wasn’t around for the earliest iterations of PowerPoint but according to Wikipedia [0] for its first several years, PP was Mac-only (mid-1987 to mid-1990)…even though MS had acquired the PP developer as it’s first big Silicon Valley acquisition.
PowerPoint for Windows was first released in 1990 and was bundled into “Office” but didn’t have the deep interoperability with other Office apps until about 1993.
Do you remember what year your school only had CorelDraw?
And price, and gobs of network effects. Macs were much more expensive than PCs, and if you were working in an office with multiple computers, being the only one with a mac was a huge pain in ways that don't matter today.
The main way to transfer files in the 80s was floppy disks. Most PCs in the 80s had only 5.25" floppies, and Macs had 3.5". Even if you had a 3.5" drive though on your PC, the Mac had a much different format. There was some software that let you read Mac disks on a PC, but it was somewhat flakey, and then you were left with the fact that the base file format on the Mac with resource and data forks was much different, and then of course you were probably using different spreadsheet and word processing software. Overall it was just barely possible to share files if you really worked at it.
What you tended to see was that most everyone used PCs except certain industries/jobs that needed the graphical capabilities of the Mac. For example, if you were in a newsroom, everyone would be using Macs because there really wasn't good desktop publishing software for the PC until about the early nineties.
The Amiga had a niche in video production because there really wasn't anything comparable to the video toaster for the Mac or PC until much later. You'd also see various types of workstations used for CAD, and in the nineties, SGI was the only game in town for high end 3D graphics. Hardly anyone bought a NeXT because they were so expensive and therefore didn't have enough software. They were pretty good for rapidly developing GUI software though, so there were a few companies, specifically banks, that used some of them for internally developed software.
> Hardly anyone bought a NeXT because they were so expensive and therefore didn't have enough software. They were pretty good for rapidly developing GUI software though, so there were a few companies, specifically banks, that used some of them for internally developed software.
Famously, id Software also developed Doom on NeXTSTEP.
Xerox Ventura Publisher was popular before the 90's and ran on the GEM graphical desktop from Digital Research (the CP/M people). It was introduced in 1986.
One easy way to transfer files between early Macs & PCs was a null modem cable and terminal software that implemented Xmodem. Very long ago, I once pulled a DBase2 database off a CP/M system with 8" diskettes over a null modem cable by printing it to the serial port, and then I captured the output on a PC with Procomm.
There was a later "Laplink" program with a cable for parallel printer ports that ran faster than the 115kb max of the serial port.
I was pretty involved with the NeXT community back in the day.
If you recall, NeXT started as a workstation for higher ed. I worked at MIT in the 90s and compared to the Sun and SGI workstations departments routinely bought, NeXT was less expensive.
And since it ran Unix, people could use most of the software they were used to.
The premier spreadsheet for NeXT was Lotus Improv, which introduced many features that we take for granted today, like pivot tables. For that period of time, the display was so much better than anything comparable. Even the original greyscale display was stunning.
Steve Jobs only wanted the best software anyway; he never wanted lowest common denominator software.
Thanks to Display Postscript, it became worth it to buy a NeXT to use FreeHand or Illustrator that could do things other platforms couldn’t when it came to desktop publishing and graphic design.
People forget that back in the days of Dos and early MacOS, people rarely switched - the waves were new people coming into the market that would often sway which was burning up the world.
Software was expensive back then, too, many hundreds of dollars that you really really wanted to keep running.
Another reason is because the simple text-based interfaces and terminals are also much more responsive. Some people prefer a snappy response over constantly moving their hand between the keyboard and mouse.
This is massively important, especially for line of business apps or tools that the user touches hundreds pf times a day. GUIs are great when there are multiple, equally likely paths that the user could take. But LOB apps tend not to be like that: there is a mainline path (or very small number of paths) that dominates all others, and apps that let the user keystroke/tab/enter their way through these hot paths are waaaay fast.
For US people, look at how fast the employee in your local Costco can look you up on their ancient-looking text app.
You can do this in a GUI, or at least, you could in native apps, to some extent, with a series of tab presses to traverse the interface, and in the peak VB5 era this wast kinda ok, but not great, and webapps are a hot mess for this use case. If I'm shopping for flights, a gui webapp is great: lots of paths are valid, and i can poke around. If I'm a gate agent looking for the last seat on the plane out of O'Hare, I want speed.
Typically, the TUIs are also really good at consistently handling input, so even when they do get behind in processing the input, you can keep typing, and it will buffer inputs and catch up. There's often an attention key which is not buffered, and will dump the input buffer and stop any operations in progress, in case something is stuck.
Even if a GUI does buffer input, it's unusual for users to be comfortable clicking where the buttons will show up, before they do. More frequently, click processing is separate from whatever else, and early clicks (or taps) are ignored or directed elsewhere.
GUIs used to handle keyboard input consistently so you could type ahead, even into future dialog boxes, if you weren't using the mouse. Unfortunately, this tends to be broken for modern GUIs using async frameworks.
This is a nice side-effect of running processing code on the GUI thread. I guess we can't do that anymore now we are dealing with network latency all the time.
I remember watching clerks at Fry's Electronics I think it was - they had PCs with windows on them, but all they ran was some sort of terminal emulator to access the system mainframe or whatever.
You could ask them for a pick slip for whatever, they'd turn around, ask your name, type everything in in seconds, and then turn to the next customer; the computer would slowly plug along through all the screens and then print out the slip. They knew all the commands that far ahead.
Yeah --- Fry's used to be all real terminals, but I guess they ran out of equipment, so they ran a terminal emulator in Windows instead (almost always full screen, but modal popups from the printer? would break it out so you could see it was Windows). And the sales and returns terminals were usually setup so you could see them work. Cash registers were under the same system, but you usually couldn't see those. Word on the street was one of the Fry brothers had written that system, I think the server was a PC in the store somewhere (they did have some ability to check other store inventory, but I don't know how realtime that was)
Airline service desks and vehicle/driver licensing are also popular places to have a well developed TUI along with experienced operators that will queue up a large buffer of inputs.
At a company years ago we had a GUI that worked "well enough" but the dirty secret was it just sent keystrokes to an older TUI program that the C-level had decided was "too old looking and slow".
A TUI isn't that far from an actual API, after all.
It always warms my heart to see these classic TUIs on a screen at a place like an airline service desk or a store. (Same as the non-IP Nortel Norstar phone systems that are 25 years old but still work that are in most supermarkets and department stores)
1. GUIs were mostly pretty terrible back then. Yes, even on a Mac. You can't tell from screenshots, but GUIs were incredibly slow and clunky for daily use.
2. Clone PCs were much more affordable at a time when the cost of a computer was very high relative to now. When adjusting for inflation, a decent computer then would be $7,000-$8,000 in 2023 dollars.
Others have mentioned the ways that DOS was good enough or even better for some applications. One of the main strengths of a GUI wasn't being graphical, it was that every program had a similar interface. If your work just uses one program, DOS wasn't bad.
But remember that the people who use computers aren't the people buying those computers. They're purchased by the boss, and the boss isn't going to spend a single dollar for a better user experience, much less the hundreds or thousands it would have cost. This still applies today to enterprise software.
Great work by the author. I really like hearing about extending the lifespans of DOS applications.