Old MS-DOS & WIN Software

[Scott Stevens]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:06:59 -0600
Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote:

> woodelf wrote:
> >> He wasn't talking about document creation, he was talking
> >about  > printing, for which he is right on the money.  If you
> >used Word  > Perfect 5 for DOS, you were limited to the fonts
> >your printer  > supported.  If you used Geoworks, or
> >Ghostscript (I used a retail  > package called "GOSCRIPT"), or
> >Win 3.1, you could use any font you  > want and the print
> >subsystem would just rasterize it as graphics.
> > 
> > But then we have TEX created under a unix system for real
> > work.
> 
> That's a bit elitist.  Some of us weren't that lucky.
> 

When I look at my hoary old Simtelnet MS-DOS CDROM from the very
early 90's, there is a TEX directory.  TEX was ported to MS-DOS,
and not recently.

I will admit that *I* didn't know what 'TEX' was at the time.

> > GUI's are not the way to print out stuff.
> 
> GUI is irrelevant.  When I was limited to a single font and
> 80-char/66-line  output -- on a device capable of 200 DPI output
> -- I tore my hair out.  It's  not my fault the only decent
> low-cost print systems were attached to a GUI.

I was limited in the same way.  There was a time (yes, for me
there really was) when I loaded Windows 2.11 to get a vector-based
drawing package that I could print from on my lousy dot matrix
printer (Micrografx In*A*Vision, which was sold including a
Windows 1 runtime version in case you didn't have the full Windows
on  your system).  And I wrote papers for school using the 'fancy'
fonts that I could only obtain on my nine-pin dot matrix printer
using Windows.  Back then, Windows was something you darted in and
out of for specific uses, of course...