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Comment by rerx | Hacker News Reader

This one is quite fascinating. It comes with a highres GUI mimicking Windows 3.1. I wonder how big the market was in 1993 for graphical applications running on pure DOS.

Screenshots: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/106ec2b0-c389-1cc3-8411-c3...

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It was a pretty big market. There were word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, music editors, etc. Not (most?) IDEs though; their GUIs tended to be in text mode. There was even at least one pre-emptive multitasking system for running multiple applications at the same time (full screen) and switching between them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

Running one graphical app under DOS needed less system resources than running one under Windows, so you could get more bang for buck. Also, at that point Windows was still not great at interacting with some hardware devices in real time, so some devices needed DOS to work well.

For Acrobat Reader, it definitely did make sense - they wanted to make the PDF format usable on as many platforms as possible. I can remember buying a "budget" version of System Shock in the mid-90s which only consisted of a CD in a jewel case, but contained the original manual as a PDF, with the DOS Acrobat Reader included to display it...

That's awesome. I missed that stretch of years when DOS games were sold with PDF manuals stored on disk, but not everybody was launching them from Windows 95...

My pre-teen self didn't get to run games from CD-ROM before 1997 or so. :-(

I remember having acrobat on my palm pilot. Man was that awful.

The GUI looks a lot like OpenGEM.

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