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Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

Until recently I helped running an old Clipper/dBase TUI application from the late 80s for a family member. We managed to run it successfully until they retired.

vDos (vdos.info) was a huge life saver for this application. It's similar to DOSBox, but more tailored to business applications. The big issue was always to find compatible printers for the old application, vDOS includes some emulation to print to any Windows printer.

There might be free alternatives to vDos, but it worked very well and is reasonably priced.

PS: we also tried to recompile the Clipper source code with Harbour to modern targets. It looked very promising, but they were extremely happy with the vDos solution, which only took 2 hours to deploy.

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Thanks for the link, afaik my clients are still stuck using their old DOS TUI in a windows 7 VM that has no network access

I've been there, this doesn't work well at all. Actually since Windows NT the DOS subsystem is already an emulation, and it's not that good. DOS applications worked really well up to Windows ME, but with NT/XP/7 it got worse.

vDos was overall much better than running DOS applications directly on Windows. Only drawback was performance. It never ran as fast as on a Pentium III with Windows 98, but still much faster than the original hardware it was designed for (~30 mhz 80386).

Our application was designed for Novell NetWare, back then it even supported row/table locks for dBase files on the shared network drive. This didn't work with Windows NT anymore. But vDos brought back the feature to Windows 10 and SMB shares!

What type of business was it? What kind of functionality did this TUI application provide?

It was a customer management and billing system, for a specific industry. Tailored to local requirements and insurance regulations (a lot of things got billed to insurance). There is commercial software available for this purpose, but it's a very small target group, and the products are neither great, nor cheap.

Over time it even got extended to interface with a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to specific locations.

It was deployed on one location with 2-5 concurrent users on the same database. The workflow was something like this: open customer/new customer, read/add notes, register products/services provided, print invoice for customer, print monthly invoice for insurance companies including all the required information (hundreds of pages).

> a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to specific locations

The joys of large business transactions handled by .txt files (or equivalent) over FTP (or equivalent). It almost feels… like digital fax, in a way.

The joy of cron jobs sending files by ftp to the mainframe, which falls back to paging the programmer.

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