So, something that’s really amazed
me since starting this channel is the amount of support you all have shown me. What really blows my mind is that a few people
have even sent in donations. It’s taken me awhile to get to these, and
even longer to figure out how I wanted to show them off, but it’s time for the first
NCommander mail call, where we do a mini-episode for each item that has been sent in, so, without
further aude, let’s get right to it! So the first package comes from Fnord66 from SoylentNews.org, and is a bunch of floppy
disks! In all seriousness, this, along with a second
item he sent were the first donations sent to this channel as sort of a “getting started”
pack. While I’ve shown the DOS 6 floppies, and
the Brief Text Editor before, the rest is new so to speak. In short, we’ve got a full set of the legendary
90s compiler Borland C++, as well as a disk labeled DESQView. When I originally received this package, there
were also some low destiny disks that came along for the ride but they’re a friend
who needed them to reinstall a system. I’m not going to cover the DOS floppies
here, since well, I’ve used these in a TON of videos, but let’s go through the rest. I actually don’t know that much about Borland’s
development products so this is more of an exploration, and initial reactions sort of
video. instead of a more in-depth look ... I’m going to get the ThinkPad out for this
which is still running Windows 95 fresh off the HP Jornada video. I’ll start with Borland Brief since, no
pun intended, this will be brief. Brief is a full screen text editor, and as
I understand it, it was relatively popular in the pre-DOS 5 days, since prior to that
point, DOS only shipped with EDLIN. Installation is very straight forward, with
autoexec.bat and config.sys updated for me, although since this is a Windows 95 system,
I did have to reboot by hand. This isn’t the first time I’ve used Brief;
it made a cameo back during the Graphical File System video, and while I didn’t find
it hard to use, it’s not entirely intuitive either For instance, I accidentally quit to desktop
while trying to save a file! I know that Brief was sold as a standalone
package, but I’m not certain if it was included with some version of the Borland development
tools as well. Still, it’s a perfectly serviceable editor,
and I’ll probably use it on any system running early DOS since it’s a massive step up from
EDLIN. In short, it’s a very welcome addition to
my collection, and I expect it will make future appearances down the line With the Brief appetizer taken care of, let’s move onto the main course. Since people seem to get a kick out of feeding
me floppies, I’ll point the camera at the ThinkPad directly, and hopefully through the
magic of DaVinci Resolve, make the passive matrix LCD actually look decent on camera. While I know a bit about Borland tools by
reputation, I’ve never really used them, so this is pretty much all new to me. For those who aren’t familiar with early
DOS development, Borland was essentially one of the kings of with its Turbo Pascal and
Turbo C products dominating the low-cost market. Later on, they had specific products for DOS,
Windows and OS/2 combined with support libraries for those platforms. I had assumed that these product lines were
entirely separate, but as it turns out that at least in Borland C++ 2.0, Windows Support
was included in the box. After examining the settings, it was just
a matter of feeding the floppy disks and running through the install process. After installation, the README file was displayed and I found a few interesting
tidbits of information. The Windows support included in the box is
for Windows 3.0 and there’s a special version of Turbo Debugger included for it. Afterwards, it’s time for a reboot. [Startup Chime] After remembering the wonderful Windows startup
chime, it’s time to investigate a bit. No new icons were added to the Start Menu,
but I had a heap of new utilities in BorlandC directory. BC opens the famous Borland C IDE. SInce it’s pretty much traditional at this
point, I wrote out a quick hello world program in C++. However, this is a pre-standard compiler,
so there are no namespaces for one, and second, I have apparently forgotten that a newline
is endl. After the necessary Googling, I got Hello
World to build! Afterwards, it’s time to explore a bit more. Looking at the tools, I was a bit surprised
to find what appears to be Microsoft’s resource compiler instead of a Borland reimplementation. That, and a quick examination of windows.h
suggests that Borland indeed licensed at least parts of the official Windows SDK for this
package. One thing I didn’t find however was the
famous Borland’s OWL. OWL, standing for Object Windows Library was
basically Borland’s answer to Microsoft’s Foundation Classes, and essentially existed
making Windows programming more tolerable. The missing OWL aside, there was your usual
inclusion of various demo applications, and I was able to build a 16-bit Windows app without
issue. However, Turbo Debugger for Windows was incredibly
glitchy, likely due to the fact that 95 is far newer than what it was intended for. For one, the Windows cursor and the DOS one
were showing up at the same time. I also noticed that when leaving Turbo Debugger,
I had GDI corruption on screen. I may need to set up a period correct machine
and play with this a bit more. For this brief dive, I didn’t do any debugging,
but I do question how well this could have worked in practice. Until Windows 95, Windows used cooperative
multitasking, which meant any single application could crash the system, and the few times
I’ve had to hook a debugger up to the 16-bit versions of Windows, it was a two machine
affair. Early Windows development fascinates me, so
it might be a good weekend project for a later date. Beyond that, I think that covers the penny
tour of Borland C, and brings us to the last disk in this set, DESQView. DESQView, made by Quarterdeck Software, is one of quite a few multitasking DOS solutions,
and probably one of the more fondly remembered ones. Quarterdeck Software was essentially the premiere
line of DOS enhancement tools, but its market share was eroded by both DR-DOS, and Microsoft’s
own tools. While I was able to install DESQView under
Windows 95, I had to drop to DOS Mode to actually use it. After loading it up, I get the DESQView menu,
and the ability to load applications. Multiple DOS applications can be loaded side
by side, so for instanceI can open up EDIT, then QBASIC, and even overlay Brief on top. DESQView also supported macro recording, and
could even juggle the 16-bit versions of Windows if installed. All of this is done through the DESQView menu
which is accessed by pressing Alt by itself which is a relatively simple interface for
managing and accessing applications. DESQView itself had a fascinating history,
with multiple revisions and rewrites, including a X11 compatible version known as DESQView/X I’m currently trying to track down a boxed
copy of DESQView and DESQView/X for a more in-depth exploration in the future. I especially want to compare it to IBM’s
TopView. Still, I think that will do it for a quick
overview for now. Next up is this sealed copy of Microsoft’s
Visual C#, which is also from Fnord66. Visual C#, as the name might suggest is a
component of Microsoft’s Visual Studio line of development tools, and was basically one
of two introductory tools to programming for Microsoft’s .NET environment. .NET could be best summed up as Microsoft’s
answer to Sun’s Java Runtime Environment and was also intended as a replacement for
many of the legacy interfaces that had accumulated up to this point. It also helped remove dependence on the x86
architecture, since .NET code was compiled to bytecode, and not raw machine opcodes. This was seen as especially important, since
industry wisdom was that Intel’s new 64-bit Itanium architecture would be the “next
big thing”. While this future didn’t quite come to pass,
.NET still is a major cornerstone of Microsoft’s product line. I do like collecting old development tools,
and in this case, this boxed set will likely be very helpful when I make a video on .NET’s
predecessor, MSJVM, and Visual J++. While it might be a while before I make that
video, I was kinda excited to unbox this in it’s own right. This package was quite heavy, and I knew from
experience that Microsoft generally included quite a few pack-in goodies, and on that note,
I wasn’t disappointed. At the top of the pile was this book providing
an introduction to the C# programming environment. This wasn’t too surprising since Microsoft
had just released C# to the general public, and this would be an important first step
to onboarding new developers. I flipped through it a bit and it seems to
be a relatively good primer on the language. Continuing through the pile, next up is this
quickstart guide, which just outlines how to install Visual C#. There isn’t much to say about it, but one
thing of note is that this version of Visual C# was also available on DVD. I had been under the impression that Microsoft
didn’t start using DVDs for software distribution until much later, but it appears I was wrong
on that account. Putting aside this quickstart guide, we then
come to this box labeled “Visual Studio .NET Resources”. Onpon unboxing this box within a box, the
first thing I spotted was the usual set of adverts for things like .NET books, and Crystal
Reports. There was also this coupon for dotfuscator,
which is a tool meant to help osculate and complicate reverse engineering. .NET binaries. Those are pretty typical finds for these types
of packages, but what I didn’t expect were these giant posters. They appear to be a comprehensive API reference
for the .NET environment subdivided by component. These posters are so large, I couldn’t unfold
them properly at my desk, instead I had to lay them out on the floor to show you all. They honestly feel like something I’d see
posted in a classroom. I’m not the biggest fan of programming in
C#, so I don’t think I’m going to hang these, but they’re really neat regardless. Finally, we come to the last but definitely
not least important item: a hefty collection of CD-ROMs. The first one is the Visual C# installation
disk, which, you know, shouldn’t be a surprise. The second is though, is the strangely labeled
“Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites” disc. Just saying that name alone is a bit of a
mouthful, but there is a deeper meaning here that we’ll explore in a bit. Next up, we have the three CDs representing
an offline copy of Microsoft's .NET MSDN library. These are especially welcome because Microsoft
has an extremely annoying tendency to delete old information off their
website, and depressingly, these reference discs are often the last surviving documentation for legacy Microsoft products. I suppose there’s a silver lining in that
it’s a lot easier to archive these than any potential dead tree documentation. Finally, rounding out the set, we have a pressed
copy of Service Pack 4 for Windows 2000. There’s not much to say about it beyond
that! With that last disc out of the way, the unboxing
was complete, and it was time to install. To that end, I decided to spin up a new Windows
2000 Professional VM. I generally have relatively fond memories
of Windows 2000, and even now, I still think it's a high point in Windows history. VirtualBox still supports Windows 2000 out
of the box, and I was able to go through the installation process without a hitch. After installing the VirtualBox Additions
CD, we’re ready to install the main event. Inserting the Visual C# disk brings up this
installation wizard which has four simple steps. Right out of the gate though, we’re greeted with a warning that certain
prequistates components are missing. More specifically, it wants IIS, and FrontPage
Server Extensions for web services development. I don’t intend to explore web development
in this video, but it’s easy enough to install IIS to make the installer happy. After the requistate trip to Add/Remove Programs,
we’re prompted to install even more prerequisites. In this case, the installer wants that Visual
Studio .NET prerequisites disk that I talked about before. I’ll let that install, and explain just
what this disk is providing. Earlier versions of Visual Studio had each
programming environment such as FoxPro, and Visual Basic be it’s own independent tools. The migration to .NET was Microsoft’s first
major effort in unifying all of its tools into a common framework, which nowadays is
referred to as the Visual Studio Shell. The idea was that you would install the basic
shell environment, and then whichever Visual Studio products you owned, such as Visual
C#. The shell environment was intended to provide
a more consistent environment for developers, as well as allowing ISVs to create their own
tools for extending Microsoft’s products. In practice, this was not a smooth migration,
and I strongly remember the Visual Studio environment being a fairly buggy mess until
2005. With that tangent aside, let’s back to the
installation. As is the Microsoft tradition, the Prequestates
disc required us to reboot the machine before we could continue.. With all the grunt work out of the way, we’re
now ready to install Visual C# proper. This is a fairly anticlimactic process, which
basically just involves inserting the disk, and clicking through a few prompts. This is followed by the .NET MSDN Library
installation. It’s rather impressive that the full documentation
set eats up 1.9 gigabytes. I should note that this isn’t even a full
dump of MSDN: it’s merely the C# components. The MSDN installation merely asks for all
three disks, and then we’re returned to the main “four step” wizard to install
updates. Unfortunately, Microsoft update servers have
gone away in the 18 years since this box set was made. While I could hunt around for hotfixes and
service packs, I think we can start playing with Visual C# “as is”. Jumping into the Start Menu, we can see that
we have “Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003”. If we had multiple Visual Studio products,
such as Visual Basic .NET installed, we’d be able to access them all through the Studio
interface. This is why parts of the UI appear unnecessarily
complex at first glance. Since we seem to be up and running, the next
step is to create some Hello World programs, one graphical, and one text based. As to be expected, the console based Hello
World is pretty simple to say the least. It’s really just a call to
System.Console.WriteLine. After compilation, we can clearly see that
everything is working. In contrast, a graphical Hello World environment
is slightly more involved. By loading up the Windows application template,
we get this drag and drop interface for creating UIs. This is what Microsoft calls WinForms, and
its their solution to enabling rapid prototyping of desktop applications. In many ways, this is
essentially a reimplementation of the classic Visual Basic 6 environment. One thing I did run into is that the Visual
Studio interface was somewhat uncooperative, and I had some trouble placing elements down
on the template. This was a fairly blunt reminder that 2003
was not a high point for Microsoft’s development tools. I could have added more functionality, but
it’s a rather good showcase of how rapidly you could prototype an application’s user
interface. Now, I’m pretty sure most of you watching
would be curious if these binaries would work “as is” on modern versions of Windows. .NET took quite a long time to mature, and
Microsoft support for early versions of the framework is somewhat hit or miss. To be honest, I didn’t actually expect this
to work, but for the sake of SCIENCE, I copied these binaries over to the Windows 10 installation
on my laptop. I suppose it’s to Microsoft’s credit that
these binaries work “as is”. I don’t know if this is due to intentional
backwards compatibility, or just an example of “it works by accident”. Finally, I will note that I can run these
binaries under Linux with Mono, but I do get a warning about the framework version. Maybe at a later date, I’ll look into a
more in-depth stress testing of .NET’s backward compatibility. While there’s quite a bit more I could say
about Visual C#, and the .NET framework in general, I think this a good enough overview
for this mail call. As usual, if you liked this content, please
like and subscribe. If you really liked this content, consider
hitting that bell, or perhaps even supporting me on Patreon. The overwhelming support for this channel
has been amazing, and there are plenty more things I hope to share with you all. It’s on that note that this is NCommander,
signing out, and wishing you all a pleasant day!
