As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I wrote all my class papers using WordPerfect for DOS. WordPerfect was a powerful desktop word processor that was used in offices all over the world. But WordPerfect was quite expensive; my student edition of WordPerfect cost around $300.
When the new version of WordPerfect came out, I just couldn’t afford to buy it. Fortunately, the shareware market was starting to take off around this time. “Shareware” was a new model where software publishers released a program for free so you could try it out – usually for a limited time. If you liked it, you sent them a check and they mailed back a registered copy of the software. Shareware often had the same or similar features as the commercial software it aimed to displace, usually at a lower price.
And that’s how I discovered the Galaxy word processor. Galaxy had all the features that I needed in a desktop word processor, but at about one-third the price. The registration fee for Galaxy was $99.
There’s so many pieces of software that lost out in the market, and the further back in time we go, the more obscure these tend to get. I had never heard of Galaxy, but I’m glad someone took the time to write this article, ensuring – hopefully – it’ll be saved from obscurity for a long time to come.
One look at that screenshot and you know it was written using Borland’s TurboVision toolkit.
I wouldn’t be so sure.
This was the design trend for a lot of later DOS-era software. OS/2 1.0 had a TUI a little like this for parts of its UI, and I am sure Microsoft and IBM didn’t use Borland compilers.
MS Word 5.5 and 6 used this UI. They didn’t use Borland, either.
Strongly disagree. TurboVision was used in the later Turbo Pascal, C and BASIC versions and it looked quite different, see e.g. here: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/967c1c190fa98b954e706b532193194d0bac135b24e577a11cf12325aeba31cb.png. You can easily spot a lot of differences with regards to the scroll bars, “window icons” etc.
You youngsters and your fancy DOS. When I was in college we used EMACS for text entry and Scribe for formatting on the DEC20 :-). It was not WYSIWYG but you could do bold, italics, greek, and formulas on the Xerox X9700 laser printer.
My high school graduation present was a used IBM Selectric for writing papers. I sold it for beer money.
“Get off my lawn” he says haha
Let’s go back to… HomeWord for DOS/Tandy/Radioshack!