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This was on the IBM-PC, it was introduced in 1982. Until then, Insight was running on Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 and 3 computers. The program was shipped by mail on 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. However, only one recipe could be displayed at a time. Many of my customers stuck with the old DOS version of Insight well into the 2000s (and some even into the 2020s). It could be even by run in Windows (up until XP) by double-clicking the Insight program file (shown here running in Windows 3.1). Even today, it can be run using DOSBOX in windows or from MSDOS or FreeDOS running on a virtual machine (e.g. VirtualBox).

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.
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".
| 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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