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Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool (Minuet) is an integrated Internet package forDOS operating systems onIBM-compatible PCs.
Minuet was created at theUniversity of Minnesota, in the early days of the World Wide Web (1994–1996). At that time, Internet software for MS-DOS was immature — the only programs available wereNCSA Telnet andNCSA FTP. Both are glitchy, hard to configure, andTTY-oriented.
The microcomputer support department at the university decided to come up with something better. Their design goals were:
The result was "Minuet". Minuet was quite successful at its time, being used at many colleges and institutions. Its usage peaked around 1996, going down asWindows 95 and its free e-mail reader and web browser proliferated.
The program was written inTurbo Pascal, using theTurbo Vision GUI. This base is a good match for the PCs of that time. Turbo Vision in its early incarnations uses the 80×25 charactertext mode, meaning very speedy screen updates, even on slow PCs. Later Minuet versions - including the last one1.0 Beta 18A - also support graphical modes up to 1600 × 1200 pixels (UXGA) while displaying up to 16.7 million colors, depending on the capabilities andVESA compatibility of the hardware used.
A homebrew multi-tasking kernel allows users to have several Minuet windows active at the same time. AnFTP session could be transferring files, while in another window, the user could be composing an e-mail. All the parts of Minuet use multi-tasking, the user does not have to wait for a slow operation to complete.
Email in Minuet resembles most standard email programs —From:,To:,cc:,Bcc:, andMessage body fields. Attachments use theBinHex andUUCP encoding schemes, which predatedMIME and were popular in Minuet's days.
In Minuet, Newsgroups appear much like e-mail folders. An innovative concept is included — Minuet would not attempt to download the whole newsgroups file, which even then included thousands of newsgroups. Instead, aPerl server[clarification needed] is contacted to search for interesting newsgroups. This cuts down the newsgroup searching startup time from many minutes to a few seconds.
Minuet also comes with a built-inGopher client.
Minuet is 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", "ls" commands to browse servers.
In its last version1.0 Beta 18A from 1994, Minuet also includes aWWW browser for the first time. However, it is onlyHTTP/1.0-compliant, renders web sites in a pre-HTML 2.0 standard and therefore comes with no web form or table support. Later common web browser features such asJavaScript,CSS orproxy server support are not present in this version either. Enabling the graphical mode, however, allows Minuet to directly render GIF and JPEG images in HTML documents, which is a superior feature compared to other DOS-based WWW browsers of the time.
At that time most PC users connected to the internet using a modem, so a robust modem-capable driver was required. Unfortunately,SLIP drivers of the time were poor — hard to configure, difficult to test, missing important features like dialing, and often not using all of the buffering features of the serial port chips. Consequently, the Minuet team developed a SLIP driver and dial-up program.