SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
Recreating the lost SDK for a 42-year-old operating system: VisiCorp Visi On
In 1983, before the release of Microsoft Windows, Digital Research GEM, or Apple Macintosh, the office software giant VisiCorp released a graphical multitasking operating system for the IBM PC called Visi On.
It was an "open system", so anyone could make programs for it. Well, if they owned an expensive VAX computer and were prepared to shell out $7,000 on the Software Development Kit.
42 years later, although the mainframe based development environment has been lost to time, enthusiast Nina Kalinina has pulled apart Visi Corp Visi On to reveal some of the strange and curious internals.
https://git.sr.ht/~nkali/vision-sdk/tree/main/note/index.md [git.sr.ht]
In this article, they document some of the internals, clear up some marketing misconceptions, discover some interesting Visi On quirks, and even provide a new application for it.
