About 2-3Y into my career, IBM CUA came along and transformed DOS software: everything got a new CUA UI. Word 5, proprietary UI; Word 5.5, CUA. WordPerfect 4, proprietary UI; WP 5, CUA.

Since then, if an editor isn't CUA, life is too short: I won't even consider it.

There's a standard PC UI. All Linux GUIs follow it more or less, except for the ones that intentionally chose to Do Something Else, to Be Different for Difference's Sake. (GNOME, Elementary, a few others.)

It's time the shell/console world caught up.

Leave the old one as an option for the old timers. Everyone else gets CUA by default.

But that's just me.

The final DOS WordPerfect works wonderfully on even early 21st century kit.

But it's not free. WordPerfect still exists and it's on sale.

So, in USB-DOS, I included WPEDIT, the WordPerfect plain text editor, which has the same UI but no formatting.

You didn't follow the link. You should have.

I built that USB-DOS tool and it contains a wide choice of word processors, from plain text editors with the WordPerfect command keys, to full-on professional tools, plus a choice of outliners and also a spreadsheet for the sort of writer who needs to model stuff -- like Andy Weir or John Barnes, to pick two I rather like.

It is how Linux used to be in the 1990s: tiny, simple, blindingly fast compared to the big lumbering commercial OSes...

... Which now are also Linux. Which is terribly terribly sad.

Several thousand more like.

Use a fountain pen. You can't press too hard: it bends and breaks the nib.

Disposable ones are good enough now, e.g. the Pilot V-Pen.

https://cultpens.com/products/pilot-vpen-v4-disposable-fount...

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

NewWave was its first and long predated even Windows 3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewWave

HP was once a UI and GUI pioneer and did other quite radical stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment

TabWorks wasn't an HP thing -- it just bundled it with some consumer Compaq kit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TabWorks

Hyperspace was one of the most widely-seen.

https://gekk.info/articles/hyperspace.htm

https://gekk.info/articles/hp-quickweb.htm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48195009

(220 comments)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

For all that DEC is nearly forgotten now, it had far more effect on modern computing than IBM ever did.

DEC OSes are why CP/M and MS-DOS looked and worked the way they did. Even DEC GUIs: OS/2 Presentation Manager fed back into Motif, which lent VMS DECwindows and DEC Ultrix their look and feel, and all this influenced Windows 3.

DEC VMS was a huge influence on Windows NT.

The hardware too: the DEC PDP-7 and PDP-11 shaped Unix, and much of the Unix and Linux design is down to DEC hardware influences.

How PCs look and feel and work is because of DEC, not IBM. Nothing about the PC is at all IBM-like; IBM's OSes are profoundly different, from the 5100 and APL all the way up to modern Z Series mainframes.

Regarding CI$, many of the things that were odd about CompuServe, even the user account names, are because it ran on PDP-10 kit:

https://www.inwap.com/pdp10/compuserve.txt

SCO Xenix.

Concurrent DOS/286.

DR FlexOS.

OS/2 1.x.

Coherent 2 (IIRC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

https://wiki.lspace.org/A_leopard_can%27t_change_his_shorts

« M-DOS

    During 1977 and 1978, Microsoft adapted both BASIC and Microsoft
    FORTRAN for an increasingly popular 8-bit operating system called
    CP/M. At the end of 1978, Gates and Allen moved Microsoft from
    Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington. The company continued to
    concentrate on programming languages, producing versions of BASIC for
    the 6502 and the TI9900.

    During this same period, Marc McDonald also worked on developing an 8-
    bit operating system called M-DOS (usually pronounced "Midas" or "My
    DOS"). Although it never became a real part of the Microsoft product
    line, M-DOS was a true multitasking operating system modeled after the
    DEC TOPS-10 operating system. M-DOS provided good performance and,
    with a more flexible FAT than that built into BASIC, had a better
    file-handling structure than the up-and-coming CP/M operating system.
    At about 30 KB, however, M-DOS was unfortunately too big for an 8-bit
    environment and so ended up being relegated to the back room. As Allen
    describes it, "Trying to do a large, full-blown operating system on
    the 8080 was a lot of work, and it took a lot of memory. The 8080
    addresses only 64 K, so with the success of CP/M, we finally concluded
    that it was best not to press on with that."

https://www.pcjs.org/documents/books/mspl13/msdos/encycloped...

It is near the end of its life now -- struggles to last the day -- and it was stuffed with bloatware, but it was good for the price in 2023.

My previous handset was an Umidigi F2 which was much better value for money. I will probably go back to them, or another budget brand such as Dooyoo, Blackview, Ulefone, etc.

Yes. I wrote the article. I use one.

> with their proprietary chargers?

Not true. It's a generic USB-C device. Does fast charge off any high-power charger, e.g. a Raspberry Pi one.