What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

When I was a kid, my dad upgraded our home computer from DOS 5 or 6 to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It was the first GUI that I ever used, and it was amazing comparitively. Every app was mysterious and innovative and wonderful.

I tried Borland C++ and it was absolutely confusing, but I was probably just too young. Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time, but eventually I finally made a simple, terribly written and horribly broken Bomberman clone.

Those looking to experience something similar to that feeling should buy pico8.

> Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time

For one whole year, I thought that Qbasic and Turbo Pascal were text editors that could also run games. I didn't understood that I had access to real compilers and that I could actually change the programs. Sometimes kids are stupid...

As for your Pico8 suggestion, you can always get the open-source equivalent https://tic80.com/ if you don't have the money.

Tic80 is great but Pico8 is better if you can afford it.

And yeah, for a while I avoided strings in QBasic because I didn't have any clue how thread or yarn or whatever had anything to do with writing programs.

Man qbasic and borland C were great on DOS

Ah QBASIC my first love

I remember being confused why the Pascal/Delphi fractional numbers were called Single, Double, and Real. Like what did those words have to do with being able to use the decimal point?

I remember being a kid and seeing BASIC in a book from the library and not understanding how to run it. I thought maybe if you saved it in a file with the right extension it would just run. Eventually I figured out how to use the interpreter.

Borland was just confusing. One of the biggest strengths of Visual Basic was how intuitive it was, even for teenagers. There was a reason every AOL prog was written in VB!

Then you learned your mistake and assumed that nibbles in FastTrackerII was coded into a module. Computers are hard.

You've reminded me of how I near bricked the family 386 because I wanted to more easily play GORILLAS.BAS.

I was quite used to loading it up in QBASIC.EXE and then executing it to play.

But I wanted to just run it by opening the file in DOSSHELL.

I knew Windows (possibly just DOSSHELL?) had the concept of file associations, so there I went reassociating things in ways I thought might get .BAS to "just run". It didn't work to get gorillas working, and in the process it seemed to mess up a bunch of other things.

This was very late for still using a 386, I think our friends had pentiums by this point.

I don't know if my Dad realised what I'd done and kept quiet about it, or just didn't realise how I'd been fiddling with those settings, but I think the extra "things seem wonky" was a nice excuse for us to finally get upgraded into the windows 95 and CD-ROM era.

It's a testimony of Turbo Pascal team.. the things was so lean and swift, compilation was near transparent. All this on early pentium and old cpus..

I continue to run Turbo Pascal on a Z80-based machine, with 64k of RAM. A pentium would be luxury!

I liked Turbo Pascal when I was young. Debugger just works. Peeking into variables just works.

Unfortunately, now I used print to debug for other languages because I thought debugger is too hard to setup

Sharing fun kid computer misconceptions:

I used a version of BASIC on my father's accounting computer that had an error message which included the word "ILLEGAL" (I forget what it was, exactly). I always assumed it had something to do with tax laws and the computer warning you not to break them.

VB came around 9 years later.

That's ok, it took me like a decade to realize you could edit .bas files in any text editor.

I perused the files section of qbasic.com back then: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804015051/http://www.qbasic...

(One of my favorites is "3D Experiment" in category "Graphics": it shows a wireframe model of a spaceship that can be manipulated with the keyboard.)

My first bug fix ever was getting rid of that stupid tail that kept growing and wouldn't go away when you moved in NIBBLES.BAS.

I guess I was really lucky that I started out on a bbc micro, then got my hands on a c64, then an Amiga, before finally beholding windows 3.0.

By the time I landed in the DOS world aged 8 or so, qbasic was my playground, and was easy to understand from the get-go, and Borland was where I cut my teeth writing something other than basic. One thing it took me a while to get my head around was that a 286 was not a 6502, and practically every little hack, address, anything CPU or memory architecture dependent thing I had learned was now irrelevant.

Coming from Amiga workbench to windows actually felt like a downgrade in many ways, but it was the computer available to me at the time, and retrospectively a good move, as by 3.11 it was clear the wind was blowing to PCs.

Either way, for me, growing with the machine was absolutely formative - the abstraction grew as I did, and I had started near the bottom.

Amstrad CPC or Tatung Einstein?

(Hi Steve!)

Still have the tune in my head. Then years later when everyone was waxing lyrical about snake on a Nokia and I’m “isn’t this just nibbles” and nobody knew what I was on about.

This reminds me of the story of an office clerk who after using Excel for a year or two was amazed to learn that it could do calculations and wasn’t just a “tables” program.

The first versions of both Visual Basic and Borland C++ were released in 1991. Turbo C 1.0 was in 1987. Maybe you are thinking of Turbo Pascal 1.0, released in late 1983, but I’d argue that one wasn’t confusing, if you were in the business of using early DOS at all.

My college decided C++ was the first language they’d teach us. There was definitely a curve there.