I have wanted to participate in this discussion since it started as I clearly remember many of the DOS screen readers and how the Windows accessibility landscape unfolded as I was working in the a.t. industry during that time I avoided doing so as I saw it not relevant to the purpose of this list. However, since Brian has made it clear that he’s permitting it I’m going to respond to messages in this thread.

As for browse mode and virtual cursor functions not being available in early screen readers I think this depends on how you define early. Window-Eyes was the first screen reader that I remember using this paradigm in the late ‘90s and JAWS added it in version 3.3. Window-Eyes implemented it using MSAA and it was so slow that waiting for pages to load was unbearable. JAWS added the capability a year or so later but pages were rendered much faster even on computers which we would now consider to be painfully slow. When I wrote a blog post paying tribute to Window-Eyes I was also advised by a reader that Artic Winvision added a similar feature but not being a Winvision user I can’t verify this.

I'm not sure this is the place to go into at length how much screen-readers have advanced since they first came out but they have advanced enormously.  For just one example, there was no Browse Mode or Virtual PC Cursor in early screen-readers. 

Gene