Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool

Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool (Minuet) is an integrated Internet package for DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

Operating Systems on IBM-compatible PCs

IBM PC compatible

IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...

Background

Minuet was created at the University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

, in the early days of the World Wide Web (1994–1996). At that time, Internet software for the PC was not well-written — the only programs available were NCSA Telnet

NCSA Telnet

NCSA Telnet is an implementation of the TELNET protocol created at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1986 and continuously developed until 1995...

and NCSA FTP. Both were glitchy, hard to configure, and TTY

Computer terminal

A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...

-oriented.

The microcomputer support department at the university decided to come up with something better. Their design goals were:

Runnable on any PC with at least 384 KiB
Kibibyte
The kibibyte is a multiple of the unit byte for quantities of digital information. The binary prefix kibi means 1024; therefore, 1 kibibyte is . The unit symbol for the kibibyte is KiB. The unit was established by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1999 and has been accepted for use...

of RAM
Random-access memory
Random access memory is a form of computer data storage. Today, it takes the form of integrated circuits that allow stored data to be accessed in any order with a worst case performance of constant time. Strictly speaking, modern types of DRAM are therefore not random access, as data is read in...

, even an original 4.77 MHz PC.
GUI
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

interface
Would run under DOS; not requiring Windows
Easy to use
Little or no configuration needed
Multi-tasking
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...

The result was "Minuet". Minuet was quite successful, being used at many colleges and institutions. Usage peaked around 1996, going down as Windows 95 and its free e-mail and web browser proliferated.

Implementation

The program was written in Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership...

, using the Turbo Vision

Turbo Vision

Turbo Vision is a DOS-based character-mode text user interface framework developed around 1992 by Borland for Pascal, and C++. Later it was deprecated in favor of Object Windows Library for the then-increasingly important Win16 API....

GUI. This base was a good match for the PCs of that time. Turbo Vision in its early incarnations used the 80×25 character text mode

Text mode

Text mode is a kind of computer display mode in which the content of the screen is internally represented in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a...

, meaning very speedy screen updates, even on slow PCs.

A homebrew multi-tasking kernel allowed users to have several Minuet windows active at the same time. An FTP session could be transferring files, while in another window, the user could be composing an e-mail. All the parts of Minuet used multi-tasking, the user did not have to wait for a slow operation to complete.

E-Mail

E-mail in Minuet resembles most standard e-mail programs — From:, To:, cc:, Bcc:, and Message body fields. Attachments use the BinHex

BinHex

BinHex, short for "binary-to-hexadecimal", is a binary-to-text encoding system that was used on the Mac OS for sending binary files through e-mail. It is similar to Uuencode, but combined both "forks" of the Mac file system together, along with extended file information...

and UUCP

UUCP

UUCP is an abbreviation for Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. Specifically, a command named uucp is one of the programs in the suite; it...

encoding schemes, which predated MIME types and were popular in Minuet's days.

Newsgroups

Newsgroups appeared much like e-mail folders. An innovative concept was included — Minuet would not attempt to download the whole newsgroups file, which even then included thousands of newsgroups. Instead, a Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

server was contacted to search for interesting newsgroups. This cut down the newsgroup searching startup time from many minutes to a few seconds.

FTP

Minuet was one of the first programs to have a graphical tree-structured approach to FTP. At the time, most FTP clients required an almost endless sequence of "cd", "ls

In computing, ls is a command to list files in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. ls is specified by POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification.- History :An ls utility appeared in the original version of AT&T UNIX...

" commands to browse the server.

Web browser

In later releases, Minuet included a rudimentary Web browser — a challenge to implement on a 640 KiB real mode

Real mode

Real mode, also called real address mode, is an operating mode of 80286 and later x86-compatible CPUs. Real mode is characterized by a 20 bit segmented memory address space and unlimited direct software access to all memory, I/O addresses and peripheral hardware...

PC. If a graphics card was available, Minuet could display web pages containing GIF or JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

images.

SLIP

At that time most computer users were using modems for communications, so a robust modem-capable driver was required. Unfortunately, SLIP

Serial Line Internet Protocol

The Serial Line Internet Protocol is an encapsulation of the Internet Protocol designed to work over serial ports and modem connections. It is documented in RFC 1055...

drivers of the time were poor — hard to configure, difficult to test, missing important features like dialing, and often not using all of the buffering features of the serial port chips. Consequently, the Minuet team developed a SLIP driver and dial-up program.

External links

Minuet download page

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