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This was on the IBM-PC, it was introduced in 1982. Until then Insight was running on Tandy Model 1 and 3 computers. The program was shipped on floppy disks. I was lightning fast, recalculating the chemistry as fast as you could push the calculate key. It could handle as many recipes as you had disk space for and knew about 100 materials and their chemistry. However only one recipe could be displayed at a time. Many of our customers stuck with the old DOS version of Insight well into the 2000s, it could be run in Windows by double-clicking the Insight program file (here it is running in Windows 3.1). Incredibly, in 2023, there are still users of the old DOS Insight!
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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