John Thompson,

16-Nov-99 19:58:00, John Thompson wrote to Andy Roberts
 JT> In a message to Linda Proulx, Andy Roberts wrote re: Get Going
          Subject: Get Going

 AR>> I exposed my wife to computers a couple of decades ago with an
 AR>> Epson QX-10 and ValDocs which had a GUI (better than WinXX has
 AR>> now) and allowed long file names, which she got addicted to.

 JT> Good grief! Another Ex-QX user!  I just retired my last QX-16 this
 JT> past July, not because of any problems (it still works fine) but
 JT> just because my son needed something a little more modern for his
 JT> school work.

One thing about Epson back then, they didn't slight quality.  Of course we had
to pay $3-5000 for it.  My 2 Epson QX-10 systems were both still working when
I put them in storage a few years ago.

 JT> But a couple little nit-picks.  The Valdocs environment wasn't a
 JT> GUI, it was text-based (except Valpaint).  But it was still quite
 JT> unusual, especially for a Z80-based system, in that it used
 JT> multiple text windows on the screen.  Ie, when you popped up a
 JT> menu, it actually appeared in a separate text window that scrolled
 JT> up from the bottom of the screen.

Technically you are right in that ValDocs was not a GUI in the sense that it
did not have Icons for loading apps.  OTOH is did shield the user from the
command line with it's menu system and integration of 10 apps.  And the menus
allowed mouse selection.

 JT> And it was probably the first truly integrated environment, with word
 JT> processing, spreadsheet, paint, graphs, mail, etc. all transparently
 JT> integrated with each other.

IIRC the word processor was even WYSIWYG.  Amazing what they could fit on a
360K floppy.

 JT> It's a shame it died so soon.

I think I got about 12+ years of use out of mine.  Actually I probably got
more years than that out of it, since I kept it beside my newer PCs, until I
could find a reasonable replacement for ValDraw, which was the Grand Daddy of
CAD.  Even AutoCAD and BlueCAD have yet to catch up with all the easy to use
features of ValDraw.  ValDocs certainly was a foundation post which many
other software developers tried to emulate.  And it took them way over 10
years to begin to catch up.  Epson OTOH decided they were better at hardware
and primarily printers, so without the financial backing of Epson, ValDocs
had to become a unique but obsolete package.

 JT> And the "long file names" weren't really.  They were descriptive
 JT> pointers that used the Valdocs indexing system to refer to the
 JT> real file names, which were typical CP/M 8.3 file names of the
 JT> form 881031A1.VAL

I agree about that too.  But again ValDocs completely shielded the user from
knowing or having to use 8.3 file names for the most part.  The default
option allowed the user to enter almost any long file name.  And the user did
not have to type that long file name again, but rather select it from a menu
with a mouse to open it again.  And as far as an index with pointers is
concerned, that is not so different than what WinXX does.  And very likely
where M$ got that idea.  Granted it is not real long file names in the way
OS/2 does it. But to the user who knew nothing about the technical details,
for all practical purposes it was the same.  And to my wife who wanted to
make her file names the full description of it's contents, it was addictive.

And raw DOS provided no good alternative to her.  I remember writing long
Batch files with error level menus and popup ANSI screens for DOS in an
effort to make a semi-GUI for her to use.  I even made some of the menus
mouse aware.  While that is not GUI in the sense of Icons, it was a necessity
to fill the gap in software development between the time of ValDocs and OS/2.

I'm certainly not trying to say ValDocs was better than OS/2, provided the
OS/2 user carefully select a good suite of apps and use a lot of REXX to glue
the pieces together.  But ValDocs development ended before M$ and OS/2 were
even imagined in the minds of developers.  In a way ValDocs was the "cream of
the crop" of a very well established CP/M system (with the TPM variant),
which eventually led to DOS which eventually led to OS/2 which eventually
sidetracked to WinXX.  I regard the Epson QX-10 and ValDocs with the same
admiration I give to a vintage "top of the line" antique car.  They just
don't make them like that anymore.  And present developers would do well to
take a lesson from those long gone masters.  There was a time when bloated
code and massive CPU power was not necessary to get the job done.

     Thanks and Good Luck,        Andy Roberts
                                  andy@shentel.net
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