GUI

[VP9KS]

Here is a question. What was the first Graphic User Interface that you ever used? Mine was a Tandy product called DESKMATE V3.

I got it with the first portable IBM computer that I ever owned, a Tandy 1400LT. It was a 4MHZ (yes I said MHZ) 8086 with a whopping 786K of ram. I souped it up by snatching the 8086 out and replacing it with a NEC V20, which was 20% faster and pin compatable. Yeah, baby, running with the big dogs now, don't ya know!

It came with a set of five 3.5 inch floppies, because it had two 3.5 inch floppy drives installed, and no hard drive. 1 disk was ms-dos/gw-basic , 3 were the Deskmate GUI, and the 4th was Quicken 1.0. I also used Laplink 5 with it. I traveled all over Europe with it, as a NATO Tech rep, and it never failed me once.

I still have the Deskmate / dos disks. Just for fun, I loaded it, using dos 6.22, onto an old Seagate ST3660 on the lab computer, and by golly it still works!

So, what is your tall tale?

Happy Trails,
Paul

P.S. This was in 1989, before you were born, remember kids?

 

[Federico Paolini]

My first GUI experience was with GEM running on DOS 3.20 on an 8086 PC with an EGA card in 1986. A couple of years later I worked at school with Ventura, one of the first desktop publishing app and it ran on top of GEM. IMHO GEM were designed better than windows 3 that came out in 1989.

 

[atanere]

My tall tales do not include GUI's!

Did Windows 3.x even qualify as a GUI? I always viewed it more of an app... a launcher, not much different from Cairo Dock today. Win95 is probably my first thought of Windows as a GUI, although it is also touted as a full operating system (except it was still DOS under the hood, as I recall).

 

[Federico Paolini]

Well... Win 3.x qualifies itself as a GUI. It is an OS? No.
It makes you interact with the hardware using windows, icons, buttons and other widgets and that's a GUI. Win 3.x had even its own apps. It's the same discussion we had about Win95 wether it was a GUI or an OS because it boots and runs on top of DOS.

By the way, back on trail, I forgot to mention the GEOS on the C64

 

[VP9KS]

My tall tales do not include GUI's!

Did Windows 3.x even qualify as a GUI? I always viewed it more of an app... a launcher, not much different from Cairo Dock today. Win95 is probably my first thought of Windows as a GUI, although it is also touted as a full operating system (except it was still DOS under the hood, as I recall).

Really Stan? do they start "This is no S###", or "Once upon a time"?

You do know that the first is a sea story, and the second is a fairy tale, right?

 

[darry1966]

Atari ST and Amiga500 OS's then GEOS on Pcs and win 3.1 and 3.11 and 3.0,

 

[wizardfromoz]

3-part answer (so sue me):

1. Windows 2.0 on a friend's computer in early 1988 (released December 9 1987)
2. Windows 3.0 on a workplace computer in mid-1990 (released May 22 1990) and
3. on my first PC purchased June 1992, Windows 3.1 (released April 6 1992)

The computer was an AT-286 (80286) with a 40 MB HDD, 12 MHz refresh, and 1 MB RAM. Only 640 KB of the RAM was usable as conventional memory, with the remaining 384 as Upper/High. Had a 3.5" slot for microdisks (loosely referred to as floppies but not) which were 720KB amd 1.44MB.

I was able to tweak it to run nearly as well as a 386 (known as Student Specials), using an MS_DOS command "setver", and could get 635KB out of a possible 640, by moving certain items to upper and high, later using memmaker, an excellent tool.

Cheers all

Wizard

 

[VP9KS]

3-part answer (so sue me):

1. Windows 2.0 on a friend's computer in early 1988 (released December 9 1987)
2. Windows 3.0 on a workplace computer in mid-1990 (released May 22 1990) and
3. on my first PC purchased June 1992, Windows 3.1 (released April 6 1992)

The computer was an AT-286 (80286) with a 40 MB HDD, 12 MHz refresh, and 1 MB RAM. Only 640 KB of the RAM was usable as conventional memory, with the remaining 384 as Upper/High. Had a 3.5" slot for microdisks (loosely referred to as floppies but not) which were 720KB amd 1.44MB.

I was able to tweak it to run nearly as well as a 386 (known as Student Specials), using an MS_DOS command "setver", and could get 635KB out of a possible 640, by moving certain items to upper and high, later using memmaker, an excellent tool.

Cheers all

Wizard

Ah, yes, I remember tweaking the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get everything to play well together in the sand box. Those were the days, my friend.... Just about wore out my copy of the dos manual, Much wailing and gnashing of teeth. nyuk, nyuk! I also seem to remember thinking that I would never fill that 40MB hard drive.
Paul

 

[iodisciple]

Atari ST and Amiga500 OS's then GEOS on Pcs and win 3.1 and 3.11 and 3.0,

This brings back memories. My first was a Atari 1040 STfm and my friend had an Amiga500. Wow the games we played!

 

[VP9KS]

Here is a question. What was the first Graphic User Interface that you ever used? Mine was a Tandy product called DESKMATE V3.

I got it with the first portable IBM computer that I ever owned, a Tandy 1400LT. It was a 4MHZ (yes I said MHZ) 8086 with a whopping 786K of ram. I souped it up by snatching the 8086 out and replacing it with a NEC V20, which was 20% faster and pin compatable. Yeah, baby, running with the big dogs now, don't ya know!

It came with a set of five 3.5 inch floppies, because it had two 3.5 inch floppy drives installed, and no hard drive. 1 disk was ms-dos/gw-basic , 3 were the Deskmate GUI, and the 4th was Quicken 1.0. I also used Laplink 5 with it. I traveled all over Europe with it, as a NATO Tech rep, and it never failed me once.

I still have the Deskmate / dos disks. Just for fun, I loaded it, using dos 6.22, onto an old Seagate ST3660 on the lab computer, and by golly it still works!

So, what is your tall tale?

Happy Trails,
Paul

Oh, yeah, that 1400Lt had extra ram. I used it as a 128k ram disk. Loading programs into it made them just SCREAM by comparison to running from a floppy.

 

[VP9KS]

This brings back memories. My first was a Atari 1040 STfm and my friend had an Amiga500. Wow the games we played!

The Amiga was just plain cool! Oh, and welcome to the group!

Happy Trails,
Paul

 

[iodisciple]

Thanks!

 

[JasKinasis]

All of the first computers I was exposed to had text-only interfaces.

At primary school they had BBC/Acorn micros. I got my first computer (an Amstrad CPC 464) towards the end of my time at primary school too. The CPC 464 wasn't a bad little machine, but I was initially disappointed because all of my friends had C64's or ZX Spectrums..... I know, I know - first world problems!

Despite having different machines, we had fun anyway - going to each others houses, playing games and writing silly programs in the various dialects of BASIC. As we got more experienced, we also started learning assembly and writing more complex programs and cheats/pokes (infinite lives, invulnerability etc) for several commercial games.

Re: GUI's - I think the first GUI I ever used would have been Workbench for the Amiga A500, which would have been in my 2nd or 3rd year at secondary school. The graphics department got a few Amiga A500's for doing computer graphics. Eventually some of my friends started getting Amiga and Atari systems too.

I saw Windows for the first time when I went on work-experience in my 4th year at secondary school. I was work-shadowing a sys-admin (who was also a software developer) at a company who designed and manufactured braking systems for lifts. They were running MS-DOS and Windows 1.0 on most of their office machines. They also had two expensive SGI machines running Unix, which were used by the brake designers/engineers for 2D/3D CAD/CAM applications. Not sure what GUI they were running on there though. When I got the tour I only saw the CAD program running. I didn't get to see the desktop/OS side of things on those machines.

The sys-admin also had a machine in his office that had Windows 2.1 on it - which he was trying out before installing it on all of the other machines in the office.

 

[VP9KS]

All of the first computers I was exposed to had text-only interfaces.

At primary school they had BBC/Acorn micros. I got my first computer (an Amstrad CPC 464) towards the end of my time at primary school too. The CPC 464 wasn't a bad little machine, but I was initially disappointed because all of my friends had C64's or ZX Spectrums..... I know, I know - first world problems!

Despite having different machines, we had fun anyway - going to each others houses, playing games and writing silly programs in the various dialects of BASIC. As we got more experienced, we also started learning assembly and writing more complex programs and cheats/pokes (infinite lives, invulnerability etc) for several commercial games.

Re: GUI's - I think the first GUI I ever used would have been Workbench for the Amiga A500, which would have been in my 2nd or 3rd year at secondary school. The graphics department got a few Amiga A500's for doing computer graphics. Eventually some of my friends started getting Amiga and Atari systems too.

I saw Windows for the first time when I went on work-experience in my 4th year at secondary school. I was work-shadowing a sys-admin (who was also a software developer) at a company who designed and manufactured braking systems for lifts. They were running MS-DOS and Windows 1.0 on most of their office machines. They also had two expensive SGI machines running Unix, which were used by the brake designers/engineers for 2D/3D CAD/CAM applications. Not sure what GUI they were running on there though. When I got the tour I only saw the CAD program running. I didn't get to see the desktop/OS side of things on those machines.

The sys-admin also had a machine in his office that had Windows 2.1 on it - which he was trying out before installing it on all of the other machines in the office.

Well, the first computer I ever had was a Timex-Sinclare ZX-81. It had a whopping 1K of ram, and no storage capacity at all. Two connectors on the back. One for power, and one for video out. what you call BARE BONES!

 

[Serafim]

Apple Lisa, March 1983. I did see a Xerox Star earlier but never used it myself, just watched others use it.

 

[finrodfelagund_]

This was another night in the museum for me... Commodore 64 & then Amiga 500 were the first "Pc's" we used for education (gaming) and that's about it... Gui or non-gui? Well, they had screens...

 

[Serafim]

Apple Lisa, March 1983. I did see a Xerox Star earlier but never used it myself, just watched others use it.

I forgot that I a short time used a PERQ 2 (or 3) but I think that was later than March 1983. We programmed in a (hopefully now forgotten) version of Pascal and the machine would stop every now and then from over-heating. Also, I remember that we used Apple's first version of object-oriented Pascal, called Clascal on the Lisa.

 

[HuMJohn]

SOL-20, 1976

 

[VP9KS]

No worries, mate. Welcome to the group!

Happy Trails
Paul