The DOS screenshots are reflective of the PC video hardware of the time. Text mode had a fixed 16-color palette [0] at best, the IBM font including graphics characters was preset, while the aspect ratio of the characters wasn’t fixed (the screenshots in the article are 80x25, but I used 80x40 or 80x50, with correspondingly more quadratic text cells). However, the screenshots aren’t quite representative of how things looked on a CRT monitor, however; it looked more vibrant and organic, if that makes sense.
Personally I didn’t find Windows visually pleasing before Windows 95, but much of that can again be attributed to the PC video hardware limitations of the time.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I worked with DOS in… WordPerfect? I don’t remember for sure which word processing application it was. But I honestly don’t remember ever seeing anything remotely “graphic“ in my DOS days.
WordPerfect 6 had a full GUI mode with a very vaguely Win3-like GUI implemented in DOS.
Borland Quattro Pro had one too.
Microsoft Word could be flipped in and out of it: in it, you got WYSIWYG bold, italic, underline etc, and more lines on screen, but otherwise the UI remained much the same.
PowerQuest imitated Win95 so well in PartitionMagic it was pixel-perfect.
It was entirely a thing in the late DOS era. It let DOS apps look competitive, and yet demand far lower system requirements and run on much older machines than one needed for Windows.
Are you sure? Your earlier comments expressed uncertainty if it was WordPerfect at all.
WordPerfect on the PC was a very niche app before version 4.2 which was the big hit. I knew a tiny handful of places that had copies of the older version but they weren't running it.
It is on the edge of before my time -- I started my first job in late 1988 -- but before WP 4.2, WordStar still dominated, with some specialist users running DisplayWrite or MultiMate. I'm not American and I think the US market was different with shareware taken slightly more seriously, so more presence of PC Write, and maybe XyWrite or other tools little seen in the British Isles.
Personally I didn’t find Windows visually pleasing before Windows 95, but much of that can again be attributed to the PC video hardware limitations of the time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_p...