This was on the IBM-PC. Until then, Insight was running on Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 and 3 computers. The program was shipped by mail on 5.25" floppy disks. It was lightning fast, recalculating the chemistry instantly. It could handle as many 1000 recipes on a 1.44MB floppy disk and knew about 100 materials and their chemistry. While only one recipe could be open at a time, notice that a reference formula could be displayed (to compare with a calculation). Many stuck with the old DOS version of Insight well into the 2000s (and some even into the 2020s). Up until Windows XP, DOS programs could be run by simply double-clicking their program files (today DOSBOX or DOS running on a virtual machine are used). My recipe collection and associated data migrated to the Windows desktop Insight, then to 4Sight and finally into Insight-live and Digitalfire.

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I did this batch-to-formula glaze chemistry calculation to help a potter with a transparent cone 10 glaze for a Plainsman P500 (a 25x4 porcelain). This version of Desktop Insight ran on the TRS-80 Model I and III, they were the first popular consumer microcomputers for business (outselling Apple 5-to-1). Notice the report uses capital letters; the machines did not support lower case! The dot matrix printers of the time lasted forever on an ink ribbon. Fanfold paper fed from a box, I could tear off only as much as was needed for a report. Boot time was less than 5 seconds. Here is what is amazing: In 2021 I found this same recipe in my Insight-live account (the green screenshot)! The results are a little different; I had the chemistry of talc wrong in 1980. Through the years, I wrote code to migrate from one system to another, and eventually it got to Digitalfire.

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Pcjs.com is a webpage that emulates vintage computers in JavaScript. It is pretty amazing that this is even possible. Notice the same recipe is being calculated as the one in the Insight-live panel on the left. Doing this is fairly easy. I downloaded an original DOS floppy disk image file from that page, opened it on my Mac and replaced some of the files with those of Insight and then unmounted and uploaded it. But this, and other sites like it, are a bit of a party trick since there is no practical way to save recipes. But you can also do this using DOSBox (and other DOS emulators and virtual machines). Just download the files using the link below, put them in a folder and mount it as drive A: in DOSBox. Then switch to drive A: and type "insight".

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These were the machines that put the microcomputer revolution into the mainstream. Insight had already been available for years. This was 12 years before the Internet. Computers like this cost the equivalent of $10,000+ today. Programmers and geeks were the early customers. It was expected that PC users would write their own software (the instruction manual taught programming). Early Mac users used the bundled programs to play around with MacPaint and MacWrite. Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar for the PC had just appeared. Microsoft Excel and Word for DOS, Windows and Mac were still years away. To most businesses, machines like these were just a curiosity.
Modern PCs are 1000+ times faster and have a minimum of 250,000 times more memory! Yet with efficient programming, both of these original machines had plenty of power to do glaze chemistry and recipe management at amazing speeds and efficiency. Both could store more recipes than multiple large three-ring binders and find them far more quickly.
| Glossary |
Digitalfire Insight
A downloadable program for Windows, Mac, Linux for doing classic ceramic glaze chemistry. It has been used around the world since the early 1980s. |
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