Borland's Turbo Vision was widely used by DOS programs in the '90s, and I actually prefer its more efficient use of screen real estate and better use of contrasting colors. But Visual BASIC for DOS is interesting in how hard they tried to make it look like a text-mode version of Windows.

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@@vwestlifeI was wondering if you know what this was we had a program for ms dos and instead of typing it made like a smart menu and you could start programs by linking them to a number. I think it was called smart menu I may have my diskette some were.

From what I can see, Visual Basic for DOS came out in 1992, two years after Turbo Vision. Microsoft probably got the idea from seeing Borland's product.

You'd be surprised how much critical open source software was just made by one guy some day

plz where are those days hiding

@@kreuner11 I’m not; I know that you’re right. And you make a very good point! 👍

@@manonthedollar I think @thatguy6858 makes a good point that might help us rediscover the days of the individual and small team. I think as he alluded to, that’s what is happening in many cases, in the open source world. That can be good and bad, but it is, small groups and individuals contributing various amounts of individual work. Of course there are many corporate contributors as well, but it’s an interesting thought.

Sorry but it's just a acript kiddie that bolted together practically all example programms of Visual Basic for DOS. I know this, because I did the same back in the day for fun. Loved VBDOS though

That was mandatory back then. You did not draw a pop-up window without a drop shadow. It just wasn't done. Now, the controversy was whether you should use two blocks for the right-hand shadow, or just one, since the text-mode characters were twice as tall as they were wide. If you didn't have to worry about what was underneath (e.g., coloring the existing content underneath, vs. drawing your shadow on a solid background), then you could use the half-block box-drawing characters. Similar considerations were necessary for the proper way to handle progress meters. There were ASCII characters with 25, 50, and 75% dithered fill, but some heathens decided just to fill the progress meter with a solid block the same color as the window background, like the progress bar was erasing all trace of its existence over time! Outrageous!

That would have just been provided by Visual Basic. This is just a high-school level application built on top of the services of VB.

Actually a lot of later DOS software did that.

I programmed something similar to this in QuickBasic as a kid so my technologically challenged parents could use their computer. It basically responded to what you did on the screen by writing to a batch file, exiting, running external programs and then returning back to the vaguely guiesque ANSI command centre

@@nickwallette6201At least back then you could see the edges of the danged windows. Now we're "modern" we're not allowed such fripperies!

Microsoft is just adding this to Windows 11

Nope, it wasn't hard at all. They just didn't want to have the then-systems slowing down by updating the graphical text for the clock every second, thats what Dave explained in detail ;). This here runs in text mode, and isn't required to run other programs simultaneously (DOS16, Win16 and Win32)... so the comparison doesn't fit at all anyway ;)...

@@Lofote I watched his whole vid on that. Seems odd they couldn't work it out, but I guess there wasn't a big need for it. If you wanted a clock with seconds, there were plenty of apps that could add this function to the tray, or have a little window on-screen, anyway.

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Not a fair comparison at all. :-) Windows would've had to load the glyphs, measure each character's width (since they were variable-width), center it, etc. Text-mode just threw the ASCII character codes into video RAM and called it a day. Exponentially less work.

Same. I would still buy it if there was a similar version for modern desktops. Too bad it all fell into protected mode bs...

@@manuell3505 For small projects it was great, fast and easy to develop. There was of course memory limitations but one could easily use libraries and extended memory for this. Also, if I remember correctly there was a database engine calles ISAM that simplified database apps development.

Came here to say that. Used QBASIC quite a bit, but was very happy to switch to VB DOS when it came out. The clue is the file VBDRT10.EXE. That's the VB DOS runtime.

I was going to say - I recognised the widgets, borders and buttons and could tell it was a VBDOS app.

I always wanted the DOS version of VB, back in the day. Did MS really think people would buy it in big numbers?!

Are you familiar with BRIEF? My dad used that forever...

Borland Turbo vision was quite a bit older than this.

Jup, you are 100% right. All examples programs bolted together in one app. Coding part of the author? Probably a weekend. But man, i miss VBDOS

But you need to appreciate how he's named his program. His only mistake was to not include 'finder' somewhere for a good measure.

@@przemekkobel4874 😆 one word: Thunder Cougar Falconbird OS

Most of the "included" apps are just VBDOS demo apps (Check Manager, Calculator, Notepad, Chart, etc). EDIT: All are demo VBDOS apps come to think of it. He's just dumped them into one program.

This operating system is actually quite easy to find, but not on Google. I don't know why people still use Google. It's one of the worst search engines now. This site is owned by google, SO, if I tell you where you CAN find this OS (in multiple places), Google will delete this post. There's more than one search engine. I can maybe give you a hint - COMRADE.

why ? waste of space for something nobody is using

@@TheCentaury You're wrong in two ways. First, the Internet is infinite in size and storage at this point. Second, operating systems aren't complicated because they have to genuinely be complicated, it's because they are poorly written. This little OS demonstrates that.

@@fuzzywzhe waste of space for something nobody is using and damn I'm so right

@@TheCentaury This video presentation on the operating system takes up more space than the actual os does. It doesn't matter. We didn't make the Internet for you. We made is despite you.

DOS Navigator was very interesting, but I preferred something minimalistic with only the features that are absolutely needed. Have you ever heard of an Ukrainian Norton Commander clone called Volkov Commander? It was a complete clone of NC 3.0 with some features of NC 4.0 and some extra features not present in either (like TSR programs memory map). It was writen completely in assembly language and took below 60K on disk (the executable file only, without the online help file) and the resident portion took only about 5K of RAM, if I remember correctly, so you could run programs with quite big memory requirements without having to exit it (as it was sometimes needed with the actual NC). Great thing, was very popular among my colleagues back then...

@@0raj0 Back in the 90s, the time of rampant piracy, I stumbled upon a version of "Norton Commander" that used suspiciously little disk space, and generally felt a little bit odd, although was fully functional for the most part. After some digging I learned that it was actually Volkov Commander that somebody hacked by replacing the string "Volkov" with "Norton". I later learned that Volkov Commander itself was nothing shady but a perfectly legitimate product. But I never actually used it properly. I actually started my journey with NC5, and then migrated to DN - as a DOS shell whenever I needed one because that was already the time of using Win9x as the daily driver. I never really had much need for something as lightweight as VC. I still occasionally use Midnight Commander on Linux and macOS for various tasks.

PopDos is the one. What fun and trouble this very small Dos-disk! Still have a copy just for fun in storage. Haven't used it in some time, it like traveling back in time to the Day's when the world was innocent for people just willing to learn new things. Thanks for your text Bro.🙏🏾🇹🇹.

Probably waiting for VWestlife's $25+inflation registration check to arrive by mail.

@@Dsun4456 I wonder if he still lives there? Obviously the email address isn't going to work now.

@@Dsun4456 He had to send $50 because he has BOTH versions! 😜 With inflation it's $97!

Probably toiling in the WinMines to pay off all the lawsuits Microsoft won against him.

According to a brief search, he's assistant night shift co-manager of the Dairy Queen in the town of Lick Skillet, Alabama and he's 26. Or, he's a retired RAF Air Marshal and just turned 106 years young in his beautiful home in Bakewell, Derbyshire, England. My search my have been too brief. 😁

I've run windows 2.03 on a ppc512 from floppy, it's pretty wild.

Works totally fine in MDA and CGA on a NEC V30 @ 8MHz! Gotta give it that!

wait until you see the QNX demo floppy

MDA ftw. Actually, I can top that: the AT&T/Olivetti 640x400 monochrome "CGA compatible" For software that supported it, the resolution was fantastic. Windows/286 supported it; unfortunately I never found an Autocad DOS driver, so that plodded along at CGA res.

or short circuit "Johhny 5's Alive!"

On my Tandy 1000SX, which is about 30% faster than the original IBM PC, it's a bit sluggish but acceptable. I haven't tried OS/5 on a real IBM CGA card in a long time, but I don't think it suffers from "snow".

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It didn't take off because it wasn't very useful, I guess. It was also pretty late to the party, even though the video claims that "John Poole was way ahead of his time". If you want to see how something like this was done properly and a decade earlier, take a look at Framework III by Ashton-Tate. It's a CUI-based DOS office package.

Take off? This DOS shell is just a novelty, albeit a cool one. It's something like a competitor to Windows 1.0 done over a decade later (in an era when computing evolved at twice or more the pace it does today). It's nice, but not universally useful for the time period.

Get a USB floppy drive (provided it's on 3½" disks) and make backups of them. They won't stay readable forever!

Very true.Just this week I opened a box of old floppies because I wanted to use them on my vintage RiscStation R7500 and of the 10 I tested only one worked even though they were sealed and stored well.

Somebody made a similar open source project for a Doctor Dobb's Journal article.

@@electroman1996 True, I recently dug out some disks I made back in the 1990s, and back then I made further backup sets of the source files but only one set out of a few sets still worked, so I made sure to extract the remaining working set onto my PC to make some new backups. Some of my original floppies were made using a proprietry disk compression format on an Atari STE, making the disks specific to that machine's drive only and not even another Atari STE would be able to read it. This was back when I was trying to get as much storage out of a 720KB DS/DD as possible, and did not have the luxury of a hard disk, CD writer etc.

@@EgoShredder oh yeah, I remember trying to squeeze as much data as possible onto floppies on my Atari STFM, often formatting them with 86 tracks of 11 sectors each. That was already pushing it a bit too far, but if you tried any more tracks the head would make an unhealthy sounding click...

Mr. Poole was doing retro computing ahead of time.

Yes 👍

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True, it is a shell... But if it contains the preemptive multitasker it could be considered a rudimentary OS. But considering that it is running on a x286 suggests that it is real mode so it will be a shell and rely on the DOS OS for everything.

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Oh man, you have no idea... :-) Under the right circumstances, this would've slayed. Expectations weren't very high back then. It's miles ahead of the DOS Shell in terms of features (although, DOS Shell had a fancy multitasker that would've been tricky to implement.) It's similar to Tandy's DeskMate, which no doubt moved its fair share of Tandy 1000s in store demos. And it's nearly as useful as Windows 2.0. About the only thing it's missing -- and frankly, this is kind of a big thing -- is support for loadable applications. I'm guessing this is all monolithic, and the apps that are built-in are the entirety of the OS/5 ecosystem. But, if Mr. Poole had come up with a loader to pull chunks of code from other files into memory, and execute them as a first-class application with full windowing API support and all that... whew. There was a period of time where Windows was considered too big and heavy for a lot of users. It was an aspirational OS. ("OS" -- really just more of a shell at that time, since it required DOS to run. An "operating _environment, "_ if you will.) Quite a bit of work was being done in single-tasking DOS applications, because graphics cards and high-resolution (sic) monitors were expensive, and the memory and CPU requirements were significant for the time. A text-mode windowing system like this would've been a very decent compromise, that allowed multi-tasking, clipboard support, file management, and background printing -- often all things that users would graft on, piecemeal, via TSRs, in some kind of Frankenstein's Monster fashion. The crucial factor, as always, would be whether anyone wrote applications for it. If this had been developed commercially, with continuous development, support, and (most importantly) a sense that it would still exist in a few years -- and thus making it a worthwhile target for 3rd parties -- well, it still may have been hardly more than a footnote. Titans fell on this point alone, more often than not.

@@nickwallette6201 This shell would have been viable in the late 1980s and very early 1990s. By 1996 when this was released used 486 machines that ran Windows 3.1 perfectly fine were quite affordable, even new ones weren't that expensive. Pentiums were but that changed quickly as well. A year later my school bought a load of 25 IBM PS/VP 486 DX/2 66 boasting 8 MB of RAM and 250 MB hard drives for a song and they felt pretty outdated by the time. Few people in industrialised countries were still forced to use DOS on XTs and 286s in 1996.

I would love to get my hands on the source and add to it.

@@nickwallette6201 this was probably waaaay too little and too late for the party. The FM is *extremely* basic even compared to DOS Shell and you can't even add shortcuts for your everyday DOS sotfware, having to use the prompt to do any serious work anyway. Also... 1996. Even my school's outdated computers could run Windows 3.x comfortably, with MS Office and other useful applications. And adding loadable software support was probably a much more complex task than the entire application that was delivered. By the way, you might be interested in DESQView. The first version came out in 1984, was a text-mode interface with resizeable windows and could run regular DOS applications with multitasking (even in real mode, though later versios could leverage protected mode and extended memory when coupled with QEMM/386)

I also searched for it and found the same thing. I would really like to know more about this software or this guy.

VB for DOS will certainly compile QuickBasic/QBasic code, it will even compile GW-BASIC code!

QBX 7.1 also comes with the toolkit to build IDEs like this.

I was just thinking about that and commented somewhere else. Technically it/they are shells rather than an OS, but if they are running in protected mode they can exhibit OS abilities. Windows 1.0 to 3.1 functioned similar to this.

Do you still have a copy? Or maybe other interesting programs that you and your friend wrote?

@@CarlosPCmx unfortunately I don't have it. It was 23y ago when we were just a teenage kids.

have a floppy burner

@@SamOlds2999That sounds painful.

or a cd or dvd @@vwestlife

what do u mean@@vwestlife

Yeah, I'm fairly sure (although it's been a long time since I used it), that the "Control Panel" and "Chart" features are based on samples that came with VB for DOS.

At 7:56 it shows vbdrt10.exe, a companion file for visual basic dos applications and in the readme it lists it as a required file for installation Edit: i guess we should all watch the entire video before commenting lol

@@mallardtheduck1 It's VB 1.0 for sure. When reviewing the readme at 06:56, you can see the Visual Basic Runtime 1.0 exe in the folder. VWestLife even talks about it starting 13:25

@@mallardtheduck1 I'm 100% sure it's from VBDOS... I loved this programming tool ! :)

​@@olivierpericat9224 Ditto. I will never forget its look and feel. At the peak of my QuickBASIC days I eventually discovered Visual Basic for MS-DOS 1.0 and thus got into properly programming TUIs under DOS (after being used to writing these routines myself and without any mouse support).

And the wannabe Windows Logo at startup.

Did Microsoft send him to heaven by car accident?

If he had made any real money from it, or it had become a real rival, I am betting they would have sued. But it probably wasn't worth suing someone over this. Probably got a cease and desist letter from them.

When you can't even find any info on the internet about this program, you can tell this little project did not exactly make waves. Its existence was most probably an anecdote, so it likely went under the radar.

@@BilisNegra Shareware, wonder if it came with the baggie?

And it it were, any kid who can create something like this has earned a full scholarship to the best university of his/her choice.

From my personal experience schools were more into Pascal at the time and were far less ambitious. This feels far more like someone teaching them self Visual Basic for Dos and they managed to create a Dos desktop.

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@@manolokonosko2868 They're relying a lot on what their development environment provided, just using it pretty effectively, so a reasonable accomplishment, but certainly not worth $20, especially when that $20 would've been more like $50. :p Definitely could've been something a well-determined student could've done in high school, or certainly university level student.

@@Aeduo I was thinking that was a bit stiff for what it was. If it had been released in 1990 for $5, it might have stood a chance of going somewhere.

Its basically the same as a Casio scientific calculator.

Around the late 1990s, QNX (QuickuNiX)had a couple of floppies that had complete OS and either a modem or ethernet connection and autodetection of devices. Tthere was a (fairly rudimentary) web browser. I found the modem version pretty much bulletproof while the network version had a limited selection of network cards.

@WeatherSTARIII - you mean IBM. MS dropped OS/2 during the feud with IBM over Windows 3.x.

@@jroysdon I know IBM had later taken over the production of OS/2 in the 1990s, but I was referring to OS/5 for DOS from this video, not OS/2.

turbovision as someone responded. vb for dos, lol

bring the quickbasic up

i subbed to you

Lots of people were into making their own windowing GUI and desktop environments back then. I was the developer of a multitasking DOS desktop environment called X-GUI that ran its own scripted code programmed in QBasic back around 1999-2000s for example and had a lot of fun programming that software utilizing the Zephyr SVGAQB graphics library to support full color high resolution screen modes for old computers. PDS 7.1 and VBDOS both backward compatible with QuickBASIC was heavily used at that time and I programmed my installers in that along with much of my source code even though most of the time I didn't use the VB additions of it simply because I felt its compiler were more robust if I recall compared to some restraints 4.5 had.

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Did you ever play ZZT? Or Kroz? Both games used the ANSI character set to do graphics in text mode. The Kroz series were all pre done dungeon crawl / puzzle games. ZZT had game levels included but its big draw was its built in editor and scripting language so people could make their own levels. There were a lot of user made levels and complete multi level games. There was a way to lock user created content to keep it from being edited but it was stupid simple to remove the protection with a hex editor. IIRC the word SECRET was in the level file near the beginning and replacing that with zeroes made the file modifiable with the ZZT editor.

@@greggv8 I think the point Fuzy2K is trying to make is that MegaZeux's additional features make simulating a desktop far more viable (especially given that its current devs partially unshackled it from text mode limitations with features like unbound sprites). It would be quite a struggle to pull something like that off with ZZT-OOP. And yep, you remember well! Replacing SECRET with anything else would unlock a protected world. You can also type "?+DEBUG" while in the game, as debug mode will disable the world lock check. There were also a couple other world locks developed by third parties, such as setting the saved game flag (0x108), all of which are just as easy to defeat if you know where to look.

@@greggv8 I love ZZT! My favorite ZZT game was ESP: Evil Sorcerer's Party

I was thinking the same, back in the day we had all sorts of dos menu systems.

But the full name of the program is "Operating System/5 Desktop". And by 1996 Microsoft had already muddied the waters of what counts as an "operating system" by calling Windows 95 one even though it's still just a GUI running on top of MS-DOS.

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@@vwestlife That's... a really dubious assertion. Windows 95 was a hybrid. It did rely on DOS to a degree, but a BIG part of that was because it would've been suicide to enforce a complete separation from DOS at that point. One of Win95's selling points was that you could continue to use DOS in whatever way made sense -- windowed sessions, full-screen sessions under Windows, or rebooting into a pure DOS environment. I'm sure there were equal parts "let's leverage some of the work we've already done to get this product out the door" and "if we clean the slate, we'll break compatibility." But I think that was deliberate. The pendulum has swung, from the initial "OMG it's a totally new ground-up 32-bit revolution in desktop computing" to "you're not fooling me, it's just Windows 3.x with new a new skin" and I think that pessimism should have run its course by now. The MS devs have blogged about this plenty, and explained how Win95 CAN offload a lot of I/O and things to -DOS- (edit: actually, let's just say "to real-mode") ..... _if it needs to,_ to support drivers loaded in config sys, or other 16-bit code. But it's really not _that_ far from being entirely independent either. Now, calling Windows 3.1 an operating system.... *that* would be muddy water indeed. Even though, in all fairness, it really did lobotomize DOS quite a bit as well, with optional 32-bit I/O, its own memory management, etc.

@@nickwallette6201 Caldera proved in court that you could separate the Windows 95 GUI from MS-DOS and run it on top of DR-DOS instead.

I mean, it is. Many people use public Wi-Fi networks without thinking twice, that warning is well needed. If it helps, the Wayback Machine can serve as a proxy of sorts for that.

They would miss 20 key features needed in any modern working environment within 30 minutes. Also this is not an OS, but somebody's hobby dos shell.