Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool

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(Minuet) An integrated Internet package for DOS Operating Systems on IBM-compatible PC's.

1 Background
2 Implementation
3 E-MAIL
4 Newsgroups
5 FTP
6 WEB BROWSER
7 SLIP
8 Try it out
9 See also

[edit] Background

Minuet was created at the University of Minnesota, way back in the early days of the Internet (1994-1996). At that time, Internet software for the PC was not very well-written. About all there was: NCSA Telnet and NCSA FTP. Both were very cranky, hard to configure, and TTY-oriented.

So the microcomputer support department at the U of Minn. decided to come up with something better. The design goals:

Runnable on any PC with at least 384k of RAM. Even an original 4.77Mhz PC.
GUI interface
Just plain DOS, no Windows needed.
Easy to use.
Little or no configuration needed.
Multi-tasking.

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

[edit] Implementation

The program was written in Turbo Pascal, using the TurboVision GUI. This base was a good match for the PC's of that time. The TurboVision GUI is a not too bad simulation of your typical Graphical User Interface, but in its early incarnations, just using the IBM 25x80 character set. This meant very speedy screen updates, even on slow PC's.

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 one could be composing E-mail. All the parts of Minuet used multi-tasking, so you never got hung up waiting for some slow operation to complete.

[edit] E-MAIL

E-Mail in Minuet looks much like E-mail anywhere-- From: To: cc: Bcc: and Mesasge body fields. Attachments are handled in the obvious way, using the then-popular Binhex and UUCP encoding schemes, which predated MIME types.

[edit] Newsgroups

Newsgroups appeared much like E-mail folders. One innovative concept was to not have the Newsgropup client attempt to download the whole newsgroups file, which even back then included thousands of newsgroups. Instead a simple Perl server was contacted to search for interesting newsgroups. This cut down the newsgroup searching startup time from many minutes to a few seconds.

[edit] 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 xxx", "ls" commands to browse the server.

[edit] WEB BROWSER

In the later releases, Minuet included a rudimentary Web browser. Quite a challenge to implement in a 640K real-mode PC. If a graphics card was available, Minuet could display web paegs containing GIF or JPEG images.

[edit] SLIP

At that time most computer users were using modems for communications, so a good modem-capable driver was required. Unfortunately all the SLIP drivers were really poor-- hard to configure, difficult to test, missing important features, like dialing, and often not using all the buffering features of the serial port chips. There was not much point in releasing an easy-to-use Minuet if the modem access was lousy, so the same team developed a quite good SLIP driver and dial-up program.