@Thaddy
Those devices have probably more resources than our first PC's. You were lucky to have CGA (16 colors,but restricted to 160X100 pixels I believe) I started with a Hercules card (1 color since black isn't a color + tricks...)
True. The most annoying thing was the low quality monitor though. After 1-2 hours of programming your eyes/head "exploded".
My first home PC was with CGA/Hercules card/monitor (I don't remember how it was switched, by
mode command probably). And Hercules was excellent, no any tiredness of eyes.
About the topic, there is one sad life story... There was a cute desktop application, pgAdminIII, built on wxWidgets library (something like LCL/VCL for C++) and it works well on any popular OSes. But once some developers makes decision to move it to "modern technologies". They worked hard for a long time and rewrote it from scratch on Python+JS+CSS+HTML+Webkit. And for now, pgAminIV, is ambiguously huge, slow, uncomfortable and glitch. IMHO trying to make desktop applications on the WEB technologies is the wrong way.
Actually, there is yet another application, FreeDownloadManager, where UI was switched to Chromium embedded, with ambiguous resources usage, slow, poor UI (but, yes, modern), and after that I just dropped to use it (remember please, it is my IMHO
) )
And there were some reasonable suggestions right here:
- Using Lazarus + LCL + CSS <---- I loveit
- ...
Somewhere it is already done on the OS (desktop environment) level:
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/chap-css-overview.html (or just search for "gtk css")
(Yes, I know about Linux place on the desktops market, it is really sad...)