Application Services (ASV)

Application Services (ASV) is a library ("unit" or module) for Turbo Pascal 5.0 and 5.5 to easily create a text-based UI (roughly based on SAA / CUA). It offered procedures/functions for pull-down and pop-up menus, alert and dialog boxes that could be operated either by a Microsoft compatible mouse (yes, with a text cursor!) or by hotkeys.

ASV actually was the first software that I sold commercially after founding my first company in 1990, called Softdesign (before I renamed it to "muchsoft" later on, a name that I was already using in the mid-1980s).

The library was written in a procedural style. Object-oriented concepts weren't available until Turbo Pascal 5.5. Borland shipped the Turbo Vision library with TP 5.5, making ASV kind of superfluous. (Turbo Vision itself was superseded by the Object Windows Library, which I took as an inspiration for ObjectGEM.)

ASV was developed in 1990/1991 (and abandoned pretty soon afterwards).

Usage

program XYZ;
  uses asv;

  ...

begin
  ...
end.

Demo

Go and try the "offical" demo application here (running on js-dos 😃).

Disclaimer

This source code is completely out of date. It is provided as-is without any warranty.

I publish the source files for historical / archaeological reasons only, for informational purposes. The code is not intended to be used any more, especially not as a template for new code.

Please note

Some parts of the code (some names, some comments) and all of the documentation are in German only. Sorry for that.

That being said:

Have fun! :-)

Thomas
@thmuch