Thinking the Unthinkable About DOS Apps

micro/scope
November 26, 1997

Norvin Leach
MSDN Online News Editor

The latest rage around MSDN Online these days is Dynamic HTML and scripting. We're still in the new-toy stage, as you might have noticed (if you're using Internet Explorer 4.0, run your cursor over the Thanksgiving graphic on the Buzz page). But I expect that we'll be moving into serious uses of this technology soon.

In fact, I heard something amazing at Comdex—a panel discussion in which a Microsoft rep and a Netscape rep both agreed on something. They agreed that DHTML was vital for the future. They agreed that, even though the Internet Explorer 4.0 implementation isn't completely compatible with the Navigator implementation, the two companies will synch up once the standards are in place.

Great times ahead, huh?

But you know, if someone asked me today if I'd be willing to chuck it all and go back to MS-DOS, I'd hesitate before turning them down.

I know. Returning to the days of the C prompt sounds like heresy. That's devolution. I'm a veritable Luddite for even thinking it. And I'm not saying I'd do it. I'm just saying I'd consider it . . . for one particular reason.

For the past 13 years, I've been running a DOS word-processing program called PC-Write. I don't use it much these days, because I finally have hardware that can run Word with sufficient speed. But I still fire it up to look at old documents.

What was so good about it?

Why did I like PC-Write? Two reasons:

It was fast. Even though it was stuck using the lower 640K of memory, its response was instantaneous. No complicated graphics. No disk thrashing. The screen display kept right up with your typing and scrolling, thank you very much. (Here's a related factoid—user-interface guru Ben Schneiderman says that in order for people to be satisfied with feedback from applications, response time has to be less than 400 milliseconds. Click a button, and if nothing happens within 400 milliseconds, you start to get edgy. I would think that there would be even less tolerance for delay with direct input, such as typing.)
It was configurable, and thus easy to use. PC-Write had an extensive set of custom commands and macros that you could program in. Sure, setting up macros wasn't intuitive. But you could work through it by looking up the commands in the manual. (A paper manual! Imagine that!) After a couple of years of using PC Write, I began adding more and more macros, until eventually it became as familiar and responsive as my car. It worked the way I wanted it to work.

That's why I'd hesitate before turning down a return to MS-DOS. Those two points were enough to make this application comfortable. In the end, I moved on, because it didn't have everything I needed. But it was damn close. And I'm sure thousands of people still use it.

The rush to change

What does this have to do with the current state of development?

Just a reminder that, in the rush to adopt new technology and upgrade products, we often forget the fairly simple needs of our users. We forget to think strategically, with the user in mind. The technology becomes so cool, so alluring, that we use it for its own sake.

To return to the launching point of this column, consider the turkey gobble on the Buzz page. Do I expect that the turkey will help you, the developer, do your job better? Frankly, no.

What I'm hoping it will do, however, is jump start ideas. I'm hoping the gobble will give you (and us) suggestions about how to use DHTML to improve presentation. If it causes any problems, if it slows down the page, then I'm relying on you, our readers, to complain about that. Whatever happened to PC-Write? It was marginalized, mainly because it never made the transition to Windows. The company that created it, Quicksoft, folded in 1993. Starlite Software bought the distribution rights, and still sells it as shareware. However, I'm told that the source code was such a mish-mash that it was too difficult to rewrite (a mixture of C, assembly language, and Metaware Pascal!). What a shame.

Do you still use DOS apps? Let me know.