Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool 1

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

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

operating systems on

IBM-compatible PC IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. ...

Background

Minuet was created at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

, in the early days of the World Wide Web (1994–1996). At that time, Internet software for the PC 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 The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, even an original 4.77 MHz PC. *

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

interface * Would run under DOS; not requiring

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

* 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. It's usage peaked around 1996, going down as

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

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 Pascal (programming language), Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS. It was originally develo ...

, using the

Turbo Vision Turbo Vision is a character-mode text user interface framework included with Borland Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Borland, Borland C++ circa 1990. It was used by Borland itself to write the integrated development environments (IDE) for these prog ...

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'', each ...

, 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 The graphics display resolution is the width and height dimension of an electronic visual display device, measured in pixels. This information is used for electronic devices such as a computer monitor. Certain combinations of width and height ar ...

) 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 technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve the information, searc ...

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 data ...

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 that was used on the classic Mac OS for sending binary files through e-mail. Originally a hexadecimal encoding, subsequent versions of BinHex are more similar ...

and

UUCP UUCP is an acronym of 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. A command named is one of the prog ...

encoding schemes, which predated

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message ...

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 family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

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 are ...

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), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

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

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

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 that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

proxy server In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a request ...

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 Slip or SLIP may refer to: Science and technology Biology * Slip (fish), also known as Black Sole * Slip (horticulture), a small cutting of a plant as a specimen or for grafting * Muscle slip, a branching of a muscle, in anatomy Computing and ...

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