Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool 1

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

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

operating systems on IBM-compatible PCs.

Background

Minuet was created at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

, in the early days of the World Wide Web (1994–1996). At that time, Internet software for MS-DOS was immature — the only programs available were NCSA Telnet and NCSA FTP. Both are glitchy, hard to configure, and TTY-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 of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

, even an original 4.77 MHz PC. * GUI interface * Would run under DOS; not requiring

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

* Easy to use * Little or no configuration needed * Multi-tasking The result was "Minuet". Minuet was quite successful at its time, being used at many colleges and institutions. Its usage peaked around 1996, going down as

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

and its free e-mail reader and web browser proliferated.

Implementation

The program was written in

Turbo Pascal Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the programming language Pascal (programming language), Pascal running on the operating systems CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS. ...

, using the Turbo Vision GUI. This base is a good match for the PCs of that time. Turbo Vision in its early incarnations uses the 80×25 character

text mode Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of ''character cells'', ea ...

, meaning very speedy screen updates, even on slow PCs. Later Minuet versions - including the last one ''1.0 Beta 18A'' - also support graphical modes up to 1600 × 1200 pixels ( UXGA) while displaying up to 16.7 million colors, depending on the capabilities and

VESA VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an American standards organization, technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve ...

compatibility of the hardware used. A homebrew multi-tasking kernel allows users to have several Minuet windows active at the same time. An

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

session could be transferring files, while in another window, the user could be composing an e-mail. All the parts of Minuet use multi-tasking, the user does not have to wait for a slow operation to complete.

Features

Email

Email in Minuet resembles most standard email programs — ''From:'', ''To:'', ''cc:'', ''Bcc:'', and ''Message body'' fields. Attachments use the

BinHex BinHex, originally short for "binary-to-hexadecimal", is a binary-to-text encoding system which was used on the classic Mac OS for sending binary files over email. BinHexed files take up more space than the original files, but avoid data corruption ...

and

UUCP UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...

encoding schemes, which predated

MIME A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek language, Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a the ...

and were popular in Minuet's days.

Newsgroups

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

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

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

Gopher

Minuet also comes with a built-in

Gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...

client.

FTP

Minuet is 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" commands to browse servers.

Web browser

In its last version ''1.0 Beta 18A'' from 1994, Minuet also includes a

WWW The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

browser for the first time. However, it is only HTTP/1.0-compliant, renders web sites in a pre-

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

2.0 standard and therefore comes with no web form or table support. Later common web browser features such as

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, CSS or proxy server support are not present in this version either. Enabling the graphical mode, however, allows Minuet to directly render GIF and JPEG images in HTML documents, which is a superior feature compared to other DOS-based WWW browsers of the time.

SLIP

At that time most PC users connected to the internet using a modem, so a robust modem-capable driver was required. Unfortunately, SLIP 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.

References

External links

Minuet 1.0 beta 16 (1999-08-17) download page

https://web.archive.org/web/20200208110647/http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/minuet/ --> Minuet 1.0 beta 16/17/18 download page
{{Timeline of web browsers, 1990s 1994 software Discontinued software Discontinued internet suites Gopher clients Web browsers for DOS Software using Turbo Vision