IBM 5150 PC

[Chuck Guzis]

On 8 Jul 2009 at 23:40, Ethan Dicks wrote:

> What else was popular back then... Procomm for dialup terminal
> emulation (if you weren't using Kermit), Turbo Pascal for app
> development (unless you were already a dyed-in-the-wool C programmer,
> and there were options for that), games of course, and before Word or
> WordPerfect or even WordStar, there was WordVision by Bruce and James
> software (my first employer).

The first programs for the PC generally were direct ports of Z80/8080 
CP/M products.  WordStar (3.30?) was released for DOS in 1982 and was 
basically the Z80 version run through an assembly-code translator and 
patched.  ISTR that you could still patch it to talk to terminals.   
I never encountered WordVision.   Supercalc, Multiplan, etc. were all 
minimal ports of the basic CP/M product.

If you wanted to use C, you bought Lattice C from Microsoft (MS 
didn't have their own C).  MASM 1.0 was a frightful hideously slow 
buggy affair that was offered in two separate versions--one for 64K 
systems and another for systems with more memory.  I loathed MASM 1.0-
-it was all too possible to generate the wrong code; something that 
should never happen with an assembler.  IMOHO, Microsoft didn't start 
getting MASM right until about 4.0; 5.0 was a marked improvement and 
6.0 finally represented something full-featured.

There were few secrets back then--the DOS user's manual had all of 
the system calls documented as well as disk layout.

By DOS 2.0, TSRs had begun proliferating.  Indeed, one of the 
problems was collision between two TSRs that didn't agree on how to 
do things.   Think of it as an early version of DLL Hell.  You had 
popup editors, calculators, comms programs--all sorts of things.  I 
offered a popup diskette formatter that operated in the background 
(yes, it was possible to multitask under DOS).

I still have the demo diskette for Word 1.0 that was packed in one of 
the PC rags (PC World?).  

Compared to the Z80 CP/M world, the early PC world wasn't bad.  After 
hard disks came on the scene and PCs had more memory options, it got 
markedly better.

Shareware was the darling of the PC world--at last, one could write a 
program with a large audience.  Bottonware was a huge success story.

A lot of the darling programs are scarcely known now.  Harvard 
Presentation Graphics, Micrographx Deisgner, Corel Draw, numerous 
accounting packages, games...

You might want to poke around in the SIMTEL archives to see what 
there is to see.

Cheers,
Chuck