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DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future
- tobiasbischoff 5y agoI was running a 4 line BBS on this back in the days. The multitasking abilities where unreal back then. Literally made 4 PCs running 24/7 into one. Edit: Nevermind, i was running the older, DOS-based version
- pedrow 5y agoThis sounds like it would need a lot of RAM to run (or, at least, more than was common in 1994). Can anyone comment on its system requirements?
- randombits0 5y agoWell, it was all about exploiting the memory management features of the 80386. DesqView was an interface to new hardware architecture that supported multi-tasking the old model, DOS with all it’s memory hacks, exceptionally well. It was a natural for running the hell out of current model, but it was doomed to fail to more sophisticated OS products that would exploit the same power. DesqView/X was the same product bundled with some very good X server/client components. Think of it as an X client as well as a local system manager running any x86 component. The shit was really ahead of it’s time. Edit: Oh, you asked about resource requirements. Yes, and yes. Fortunately, DOS binaries aren’t large, but it’s all relative.
- h2odragon 5y agoFar too much? IIRC the first version "technically" could run on a 286/2mb but they went to 386 only almost immediately. IIRC 4mb was pretty common by then among anyone who could be using it.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoBy 1992, 1993 most machines were shipping with around 4MB. The 486DX/50 I got (I believe fall 93) was an 8MB machine.
- eatfish 5y agoAround that time DOS programs were still being written to fit within 640KB of memory. However PC's were starting to be shipped with 2, 4 or even 8MB of RAM - memory really was a solution in search of a problem at that point. Windows 3.1 was the primary application for all that memory. But what if you didn't want, or need, to run Windows 3.1? Well that's where DESQview fit in. You could task switch between DOS programs instead using all that sweet memory (but not really, because DOS doesn't multitask, so 4 switchable ttys of DOS programs is a better description)
- blihp 5y agoSeveral important DOS applications (spreadsheets, databases, CAD etc... even Doom required 4 Meg) were absolutely able to use more than 640k which was why you saw PCs with more memory: there were applications people cared about that needed it then. Granted, it was a painful business that had all sorts of limitations but the use cases were there. Anyone paying attention could look around and see that this problem had already been solved in better ways on other platforms and the various DOS multitaskers were just stop-gaps until a more universal solution (both OS and application) came along.
- eatfish 5y agoTrue, and I think Quarterdeck (and Pharlap, Rational, etc.) developed the VCPI specification that allowed those DOS extenders to work cooperatively. Some of the early DOS extenders took over the entire machine and did not allow that.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoI remember telling the boss that Windows 95 really required 8MB of RAM, it was unusable at 4MB. Though MS supported it, it swapped like crazy. Most of our PCs didn't have 8 and would need to be upgraded. Around that time I found a PC running NT in a lab with 20MB in it (cobbled together from two PCs) and thought it was astounding.
- Trixter 5y agoIt required a 386sx or better with 4MB of RAM, and EGA or better graphics card. This is quite reasonable for 1992, and the extra ram was likely needed only for the graphics. DESQView itself could run on an 8088 system and didn't even require EMS (although if you did have an EMS board, and configured the system so that the EMS board backfilled the latter 512K, it could multitask much larger programs at the same time as that enabled it to swap entire programs in/out of lower address space instantly). I've been a low-level 8088 coding hobbyist for many years, and DESQView is still incredibly impressive to me, especially since I know what it has to do under the hood to work and be stable.
- pavlov 5y agoThe article trips into the age-old trap of X11's client/server terminology being the opposite of expectations. In X, the server is the graphical terminal (i.e. your computer) and the client is the remote computer executing the program. The idea is that display and UI devices are the static resources being served to any number of programs.
- dmead 5y agoI came here to say this. either the author was confused by the features or they chose to reverse it to make it easier to understand.
- Aeolun 5y agoNot saying you are wrong, but I’ve never referred to it like that. If my linux desktop is running an application that I’m seeing through an X client on my laptop, then my laptop is the client, and the desktop is the server.
- asveikau 5y agoThe application is the client. It calls connect() to reach the display server. Even Windows and Mac have a concept of a display server which is pretty closely the same. Yet people don't seem to criticize that?
- simonh 5y agoAt the level of the hardware that’s fine, but in X Windows software architecture terminology the X Server is the user application presenting the UI. It’s not technically accurate to say that this or that computer is the server or client, the X architecture isn’t about hardware, it’s about software components. You often run both the X server and several X client applications on the same box for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Software_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Software_archi...
- linsomniac 5y agoNope. In X, your monitor is the server. In your example, the laptop is the X server, and the desktop is the X client. HOWEVER, and probably what trips people up, is that the desktop is your COMPUTE server. But the laptop is the PIXEL SERVER. I mean, sure, you can call your laptop the client all day long, but in X windows terminology the laptop is the X server. So you'd be wrong. :-)
- NoGravitas 5y agoOne of my dorm-mates had this at college. It was a really good choice for them, since they used the university's Unix servers a lot, but they also played a lot of DOOM. It seemed to multitask DOS software about as well as OS/2, which is to say, much better than Windows 3.1, and somewhat better than Windows 95. I probably would have used it if I hadn't already adopted OS/2 at that point.
- h2odragon 5y agoI had a DesqView/X Tshirt for the longest time; wore it to several shows and only had one person recognize it. I got it at the COMDEX Chicago show where they were doing their first demos (nothing for sale today, sorry) and the GEOS booth got kidnapped by the AOL team for their deal. Nearly had to tackle the guy for it but I just knew that this was a "damn that shoulda worked" doomed product right then. Edit: As I recall, they were far more interested in playing with their R/C blimp that morning than in talking to customers. I had a spiel all wound up about "I can put copies of your software in $X offices this month, if it works for our app: gimme a demo copy" but never got to deliver it.
- mikestew 5y agoI have that t-shirt, because I was at that COMDEX! (I'd say that such an admission dates me, but admitting to having ever attended a COMDEX is going to date you.) It is disappointing about the booth personnel's lack of interest, but you did at least milk a blimp out of them, right? IIRC, we had about as much engagement when we talked to them, but at least we got swag (granted, the "R" in "R/C" stood for "wired remote", not "radio"). Stopped at McDonald's on the way home to Indianapolis to fill it with helium. Played with it for a month, then lost interest, like most swag. Still, probably the best swag we've received. I used DESQview for years, but the /X was doomed to fall under the wheels of the Windows 95 marketing machine, or just the MS marketing machine in general. Even I didn't use it all that much, having moved on to OS/2 Warp when it came out.
- h2odragon 5y agoI did not get a blimp. The dude i was with snaffled that; he'd got the tickets through some friend of his, so fair enough.
- richardfey 5y agoI'd love to see that tshirt
- IncRnd 5y agoI never used DESQview/X, though I knew about it, of course. I used DESQview, which was absolutely head and shoulders above everything else that was DOS-based. DV turned a single instance DOS machine into something far more. It was like I was back in University with the ability to swap between multiple terminals. Except the main difference was increased speed. It seemed as fast as the Cray I had used. It wasn't, of course, but there was no delay after I would press enter! I had the entire workstation computer to myself. A database job in one tab (foxpro!). A print job to a farm of rena printers in another tab (custom mail-merge). Ah, those were the days. lol. Back to the modern and more interesting problems of 2021 :)
- Clubber 5y agoI used DESQview to run a multi-node BBS back in the day. I tried using Windows 3.1 but it was dog slow in comparison.
- randombits0 5y agoThis is where I used it as well. It was that, PC-MOS, or later, OS/2. So, Wildcat! or PC-Board?
- Karunamon 5y agoIf you have a retro PC or a quality emulator you can get ahold of this and play with it. DOSBox won't cut it since an extended memory manager, specifically QEMM, is required and doesn't emulate well. Use a full VM or something like PCem. https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x
- rnd0 5y agoPCem has been all but abandoned, try 86Box instead. https://86box.net https://86box.net
- sparcpile 5y agoNathan Lineback has an article with more screenshots on his site. His review is over 20 years old now. http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html
- bjarneh 5y ago> This is the DESQview/X File Manager. It's not very friendly (no drag-and-drop and double-clicking an executable opens it in a hex viewer instead of running it) but it has enough functionality to be usable. hex viewer :-)
- spullara 5y agoI was working at a small manufacturing company in Tennessee over my summer break from college in I think 1992 and they had decided to buy DESQview because it looked cool. It really was amazing multitasking our netware apps on it.
- pjmlp 5y agoI remember it from Dr Dobbs ads, never got to use it though.
- wk_end 5y agoSounds amazing. Why wasn’t it a success? Was performance bad on the systems of the time? Priced too high? Lack of marketing muscle?
- WoodenChair 5y agoThere's some information on Wikipedia about the company's decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#Decline_of_DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#Decline_of_DESQview
- narrator 5y agoSeems like the pre-Linux trend of nickel and diming for everything, especially tcp/ip network connectivity contributed heavily to the failure of the platform.
- bboreham 5y agoNo application software. Went up against Windows 3.
- a-dub 5y agopc market also didn't have much use for X11 then either. i think this even predated xfree86. would be curious if it actually would work with remote x clients on the unix machines of the time. (assuming they had complete X11 implementations)
- pjmlp 5y agoIt did, xfree86 was a Linux thing.
- bboreham 5y agoI worked on X11 applications from 1988 to 1992, including Lotus 123 for Motif. Every Unix machine of the day had a complete X11, it was the big thing. The PC market had X servers like Exceed, but in 1990 it was uncommon for a PC to have enough RAM to run DOS, a TCP stack and X11. Also the TCP stack was $400 per seat. As PCs got more powerful, Windows 3 fitted most people’s needs much better, and came with Solitaire.
- gyoza 5y agoI used this to play games and run my bbs at the same time lmao
- pengaru 5y agoI tried doing that but it crashed my system more often than not. Then I got a copy of os/2 warp and never looked back, only moving on when I received an infomagic 4 cd set of linux distros.
- jweir 5y agoOh I remember... I was a young lad and I thought this was the future! So much so I bought stock in Quaterdeck. That didn't work out so well. Good to learn those lessons young.
- pantulis 5y agoQuarterdeck really had some dope stuff those days, they were great. Sorry your investment didnt pan out!
- emersonrsantos 5y agoCould never play with this because it was a paid product and the company didn't have any offers on my country.
- canadian_tired 5y agoOh wow. I fondly remember DesqView (no /X) and being completely amazed. I think around that time the larger buzz was around SCO Unix.
- time4tea 5y agoInteresting, hadnt heard of Desqview for years. Think maybe it got X server and client mixed up?
- ttyyzz 5y agoThere's a button that says "Button" :)
- pan69 5y agoI remember running DesqView (without the X) in the early 90's, it must have been on a 286 (is that possible?), I only got a 486 around 1994. I remember being impressed by the fact that I could run multiple applications at the same time and switch between them. I think I ran a BBS at the time (a combination of Frontdoor and something else... the memory is thin). I vaguely remember excitingly showing my parents, probably my mother, "Look! I can run multiple applications and switch between them!!!", and she gave me a confused look of "what the hell is this boy going on about".
- EricE 5y agoYes, I knew several guys that used DesqView for running multi-node BBS's. Before DesqView, it wasn't uncommon for multi-node BBS guys to have a Novel server and one PC per modem per phone line. I played with but didn't run it - I was running Maximus on OS/2 at the time :)
- sixothree 5y agoI ran a BBS using DESQview on an 80286 with a Rampage memory card. It connected nightly to the Fido BBS "Southern Star". Very cool stuff for the time. DESQview was a huge help maintaining the board while it was actually running, and especially for the nightly tasks. edit: I should add, the BBS software was Maximus.
- tptacek 5y agoYep! This is me! Both DesqView and DesqView/X --- because I had a Renegade BBS with Frontdoor.
- tobinfricke 5y agoSame! Before switching from DesqView to OS/2. Those were the days! :-)
- tptacek 5y agoI, too, switched to OS/2. And then back. :)
- mbreese 5y agoI used this for a while. It was a great system for running a couple of DOS BBS instances (on two lines![1]) in the background while also running Windows 3.1. Although, I can't imagine that this use-case was all that popular. It was a great glimpse of what was possible on the hardware of the day, but still seemed like more of a gimmick. But given that we run everything on virtual servers these days, it was really ahead of its time. [1] PCBoard, if you want to know. Writing door programs in the PCBoard language was my first real taste of programming.
- tlack 5y agoI loved the PPE modding system. I wish I could find my old PCBoard software!
- dang 5y agoWow, looks like this has never had an HN thread before. One interesting submission (https://archive.org/details/desqview-x-booklet https://archive.org/details/desqview-x-booklet) but no comments: DesqView/X: A Technical Perspective [book] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061438 - Jan 2014 (0 comments)
- sedatk 5y ago> Just about everything (including resizing and moving windows) can be done entirely from a keyboard without ever touching a mouse. The mouse works everywhere, but you don't need to take your hands off the keyboard if you don't want to. That's literally how Windows has worked since 1.0. You can still resize and move windows without leaving the keyboard. The shortcut key is Alt-Space if you're curious.
- jeroenhd 5y agoStarting with Windows 8 and progressing into Windows 11, this has become less and less true. Clicking the top left no longer opens the window menu, double clicking the icon no longer closes the application. Old keyboard shortcuts stop working as applications implement their own UI controls through Electron and similar systems. Keyboard shortcuts work inconsistently or completely because the developers of the necessary UI frameworks don't know or don't care about them, Microsoft itself included. The legacy systems and functionality of windows are being removed as programs are turned into apps. I think that's a real shame.
- sedatk 5y ago> Clicking the top left no longer opens the window menu, double clicking the icon no longer closes the application. > Old keyboard shortcuts stop working as applications implement their own UI controls through Electron How are these related to the keyboard support in the OS? > Microsoft itself included Can you give an example where Microsoft stopped caring about keyboard shortcuts?
- DoneWithAllThat 5y agoFor awhile in the early 90s, McAfee Associates FTP server ran on a box running DESQview/X. It was the first time you could download Viruscan/Virushield over the internet, rather than getting it off a floppy or BBS.
- femto113 5y agoAh from the time of great widget wars, when Motif and OPEN LOOK were battling for GUI supremacy. I was vehemently team OL (via Sun's OpenWindows flavor) and absolutely loathed how bulky the borders felt on Motif windows.
- DonHopkins 5y agohttps://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47#4fa8 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly.
- vickm 5y agoI couldn't stop laughing/crying reading this trip into high school and college. As a kid I thought I was the dense fool who couldn't make sense of X. Nope, it just sucked. Thanks for keeping this history alive :) As a matter of fact, the mess with widgets and X APIs was the turning point for me where I started to understand why these suits spent so much damn $$$ on Win32
- sedatk 5y agoOn the contrary, I'd found Motif's 3D look so elegant and cool that I'd even incorporated it in my DOS-based GUI library. This is a BlueWave/QWK reader I'd written with it: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine https://github.com/ssg/wolverine
- int_19h 5y agoYour widgets look like they have a 1px 3D border? The Motif that I remember was much bulkier, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg
- andrewstuart 5y agoSurely there's a technical visionary behind this. I wonder who and what the story was of its creation?
- kloch 5y agoDESQview/X was amazing and fun. > it would be quite nice to be able to run DESQview using newer graphics cards (read: higher resolution) This was by far it's biggest limitation. At the time interest in higher than SVGA resolution was just beginning. Support for the latest high resolution cards/modes was limited (though I think later versions had generic VESA driver support which helped somewhat. Don't forget your monitor also had to support higher resolutions and large high resolution monitors were very expensive.
- vzaliva 5y agoI remember running long compilations (~1hr) under DESQview while doing some editing or even playing siple DOS games in parallel. It was amazin. DESQview/X never caught up with me or anyone I knew.
- agumonkey 5y agojust ran into that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_lfpdK7bQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_lfpdK7bQM 'DESQView/X 2.1 (x86) Motif running under VirtualBox'
- jd3 5y agoI first learned about DVX from another HN commenter a few years ago — i was in the middle of an OS pattern archiving project at the time, so if you're interested in pantomiming the DVX ui, here are the raw xpm/pngs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045149 http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/OEM/DVX/ http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/OEM/DVX/
- pridkett 5y agoLike many people in this thread, I used DESQview for BBSes and later DESQview/X, but there wasn’t much graphical that I could find for it. Eventually I moved to OS/2 because it was easier to program, but it still holds a fond place in my heart. I just wish I would’ve realized the real power of X back when I was on DESQview/X, not that it would’ve mattered with only one PC in the house. A decade later when I got to CMU for grad school I was talking to a professor when I saw he was using DESQview/X as his desktop OS…in 2004. I thought that was wild until I met a cluster of folks at IBM Research still running OS/2 in 2012 when my office got moved to Yorktown Heights. Such pleasant memories…but I think I’ll stick with modern desktop environments.
- sitkack 5y agoI used to covet the DESQview/X ads in Byte magazine when I was kid. I ended up getting and Amiga which offered basically the same functionality. DESQview was technology from a different timeline. I did end up running a bunch of surplus X terms in my home lab, MIPS R4400 based with 32MB of ram. It was glorious.
- marcodiego 5y agoEpiphany: imagine one of those old, small but thick notebooks. Install FreeDOS on it, hide a small ARM SBC inside it. Connect both machines through network and run an X server on FreeDOS. Instant, retro style, modern guts UNIX laptop.
- danans 5y agoIt's nice, for a change, to read about an old technology that I am barely young enough not to have known about or used! That's a rarer feeling for me with each passing day!
- brudgers 5y agoI bought a copy because in theory it would allow running AutoCad while multitasking. I kind of got it to work with more late nights than it was worth…a lot of that due to a complete ignorance of X.
- waynecochran 5y agoI remember this! Reminds me of the days when M$ had such a monopolistic stranglehold on everything -- would not allow something incredible like this make it. People forget just how anticompetitive Gates was. I still remember arguing w someone who said "preemptive multitasking was something the average user will never want." <sigh>
- mftb 5y agoDon't know why the author calls it an OS, then acknowledges in the article it's not an OS. It was a windowing system, based on X, running on top of DOS, much like Windows 3.1 did. Anyway it was cool, but strained common HW of the day. OS/2 was generally seen as the alternative. What do you call it when all the products from a particular moment are left behind?
- mlyle 5y ago> It was a windowing system, based on X, running on top of DOS, Ehhh.. DOS isn't much of an OS-- more of an abstraction layer over hardware. Desqview provided a significant extension by providing multitasking services and abstraction of the display device.
- aidenn0 5y agoThere was an old hint that OS/2 is half an OS, and DOS is a boot sector virus.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoDOS is basically a bootloader program like grub at that point. People tend to forget how primitive it was. Not a whole lot different conceptually than a UEFI environment, but in "real mode" and minus the extended memory access. Netware was another server OS that reused it. I think even some Linux utils could load it from DOS. Both loaded themselves directly into memory right over DOS if memory serves, because it had no ability to stop you. So yes, an OS, at least the 99% that matters.
- anthk 5y ago>DOS is basically a bootloader program like grub at that point. People tend to forget how primitive it was No. A BIOS wrapper with an ABI.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoYes. The products mentioned didn't use that, or if they did, once to load themselves.
- anonymousiam 5y agoI ran this for a while before I switched to Linux. It was a truly outstanding piece of software.
- cardiffspaceman 5y agoSince the fine article is not solely about running a BBS, I will throw in an anecdote about using Windows 3.0 for multitasking. My colleagues and I had 1 MiB 386 DOS machines for writing and cross-assembling Z80 software. I was inspired by a shoot-out article in one of the PC magazines that compared DesqView, Windows 3.0, and TopView. Apparently it wasn't widely known in 1990 that Windows 3.0 DOS boxes were preemptively multitasked in 386 enhanced mode, with one of those DOS boxes being used for Win16. (This is a fair but radically simplified description of Windows 3.0) The author of the shoot-out pointed out that you could multitask DOS programs this way. So I got approval to install an additional 4 MiB of RAM and Windows 3.0 on my system. Once I got that booted up I started a program build in one DOS box and the text mode source editor in another. I had never had the chance to multitask in this way before, so I stared at the source code, trying to decide what to do. Until the makefile automatically tried to load the binary into the Z80 debugger. The PC locked up. Since my assumption had been that this method would work out of the box, it was clear that it wasn't time yet for this. I did enough to conclude that the serial port code in the host code of the Z80 debugger was the issue, but not enough to figure out exactly where the bug was. DesqView and TopView would have been equal to Windows at doing what I was trying to do, but I think Windows was close to the same cost and also had some other potential benefits. I used my enhanced machine to enhance some tools that benefited from having "lots" of RAM, and gradually my colleagues added the RAM and ran those tools and modified others, and that was the direction the experiment went until I moved on to another company.
- jmclnx 5y agoI remember it well, never used it but did use DESQview. I thought Microsoft put in a serious offer for QuarterDeck(?), but the owners declined. Probaly due to DESQview/X. So that is when MS started on Windows 95. I thought not accepting the offer was a mistake, curious what would have happened if they did sell out.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoThey would have made some money, and the rest of us would have access to a professional OS ~five years earlier! I remember wanting to throw a monitor though a window for several years in the late 90s. I had access to OS/2 and Linux as well, but many apps ran only on Windows. (Assuming it used a lot less resources than NT, Win 2000 didn't arrive until 2000ish, XP 2001ish.)
- faster 5y agoI was a huge Desqview fan, and I tried Desqview/X but didn't stick with it. In the 80's I built a multi-line electronic claims submission host for a local insurance company that ran the same app 4 times under Desqview (not X). Each app talked to different port of a 4-port serial card, each port hooked to a 2400 baud modem. I had to write an ISR in assembly to handle the incoming serial data because the drivers for the serial card couldn't do the job, but other than that, the Desqview APIs were all I needed.
- JackLinFLL 5y agoWell this brings back memories. I ran a Wildcat BBS under DesqView on a 286! Good times. I really miss Fidonet. The whole online experience, even at 300 baud, was so much more entertaining and educational when everyone there mostly had to build a system, hide your nerdy hobby from the cool kids and be able to use a CLI.
- anthk 5y agoYou can access fido thru syncro.net with some bbs+qwk tool or via nntp.
- chipx86 5y agoThis was a wonderful surprise. DESQview (and anything early Quarterdeck) holds a special place in my heart. My uncle, Gary Pope, co-founded the company. I grew up with DESQview and QEMM as two of our primary pieces of software running on our computers. I moved onto Linux many years later, and used to have a Linux box as my primary machine, but with a DOS computer sitting next to it, DESQview/X loaded up, and would use DESQview/X as a makeshift second monitor by using it as an X11 display server. DESQview/X was based on X11R5, I believe, rather than X11R6, so I was a bit limited in terms of which software worked, but terminals were just fine. Anyway... A while back, I assembled all the DESQview/Quarterdeck material I had sitting around and put it up for others to look at. There's some stuff in here that you won't find anywhere else: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/htvf2edf3mrx0be/AABllqVhf0BzOytupW2PHnTsa?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/htvf2edf3mrx0be/AABllqVhf0BzOytup... There's a README with some background, screenshots, marketing material, photos, product reviews, and even a paper that my mom wrote up about DESQ (the precursor to DESQview and DESQview/X), with a little bit of background on its development, back in 1984. Hope it proves interesting! :)
- stuaxo 5y agoWow, thanks for putting it up - I was always curious about the world of QEMM software but missed it at the time. There is some ongoing work to get this working in DOSEMU2. Would you consider asking your family if they would be up for opening the source code for Desqview/X ?
- chipx86 5y agoThe source code, along with all other assets, were sold to Symantec in the late 90s. My uncle doesn’t have any copies of it, and so much time has passed that there aren’t any contacts at Symantec to ask (if Symantec even preserved the source to begin with — they didn’t buy the company for DESQview). Early in my career, I did work with a former employee of my uncle’s, who worked on DESQview/X back in the day, and we spoke a lot about that time. If he had the source stashed away someplace, he never admitted it. I wish I could offer more hope than that. I want it too :/
- ta988 5y ago
- ezconnect 5y agoI always wanted to try this OS when it came out but I couldn't get a pirated copy of it.
- Firehawke 5y agoAs someone who ran a BBS for an extended period of time, DESQview (and obviously QEMM) was an essential part of daily life. It allowed for a lot of things that you'd take for granted today-- like logging into an additional local-only node in the background to reply to messages, or doing file management while you had users online. Hell, even load up some less-intensive games in the foreground and carefully set up DV's preemptive levels to minimize the slowdown to the BBS. We started with QuickBBS but migrated to RemoteAccess later when QBBS went through a major stall and never recovered. As far as I understand, QuickBBS suffered from a major problem with leadership/ownership-- I don't remember specifics but I do remember that there was maybe one or two releases after that got cleared up but QBBS had already died off by that point. Since RemoteAccess was nearly 1:1 compatible and still getting upgraded, the decision was pretty obvious.
- strenholme 5y agoThe thing about DESQview is that, by 1995, running Linux with X as a desktop OS was viable. So, for people who wanted X, they could get it as a native client in Linux for free. Linux also had pretty good support for Windows applications via Wine. It’s the same position Coherent was in; sure, it was cool technology at the time, but Linux was also available and was underselling the competition. The only PC OS anyone was paying money for in 1995 was Windows 95 or Windows NT; Windows 95 had killed OS/2 Warp at this point, and proprietary UNIX and UNIX-like stuff on PCs was already being edged out by Linux.
- fulafel 5y agoIf you wanted to be able to multitask DOS and Linux at the same time though... I wonder how DESQview/X emulation capabilities and support for showing them in X windows compares to Linux Dosemu of the era.
- aidenn0 5y agoThis made me think of GEM and PC GEOS, both of which competed with DesqView prior to windows 3 owning the market. Apparently GEM got an X server and GEOS had it's most recent release in 2009!
- janandonly 5y agoIt looks like GeOS from GeoWorks. https://tedium.co/2019/06/20/geoworks-geos-history/ https://tedium.co/2019/06/20/geoworks-geos-history/
- pjmlp 5y agoGeos also has quite an interesting history behind it. In Portugal it was mostly bundled with Phillips PCs.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoThat is because GeOS tried to look like MOTIF. The linked article even says so. But... IIRC that was just the default look/theme, and you could switch between a hand full of (only) slightly different ones.
- philkrylov 5y agoRunning a disk defragmenter and a GW-BASIC number crunching script in parallel under DESQview taught me lots of things, e.g. repairing data from what'd been the FAT16 HDD partition before.
- shever73 5y agoThis takes me back. A friend of mine worked in Quarterdeck's Dublin office and got me a copy of DESQview/X. It was a great piece of software.
- qwerty456127 5y agoWhat seems sad to me is it's not nearly easy nor popular to make and use themes which would style modern OSes to look exactly (or very close to) the OSes of the past. Once Windows XP arrived with its "visual styles" theming technology I thought the world will never be the same - everyone will be able to have their windows and controls looking whatever they like, just a matter of a mouse click (and a couple of bucks perhaps). In the reality, though, high quality themes (for any OS) seem weirdly scarce and making your own seems prohibitively hard.
- mdip 5y agoI've written about this software in the past, but I was a former user for quite some time. Back in the day I ran a multi-node BBS and like the vast majority of BBSes in my area, they were all DOS-based applications[0]. I had written my own BBS software, originally a Telegard 2.4(3?) hack. It was basically impossible to get a multi-node system working purely with DOS/Windows[1]. The (few useless) options for multi-tasking were nearly non-functional and this became monumentally worse when I had re-written the library which put text on the screen with some fancy assembly language that made everything positively fly on my 80486. Enter Desqview/X -- for the DOS era, it was crazy. It just worked. Very few things other than the simplest in DOS "just worked". Aside from the odd interface (which wasn't all that much more odd than Windows 3.x) it performed exceptionally well, managing three active nodes without choking. Meanwhile, dear old Dad could fire up Lotus 1-2-3 while the BBS was running and didn't have to take the whole setup down[2]. [0] Telegard (later Renegade) and T.A.G. were the most common in my area code. I ran custom software that I wrote. [1] Not entirely true, I know before I ran Desqview/X I was doing something else to make everything work, but it fell apart when I altered the software to improve screen writing performance. [2] My dad was a small business owner who did his and the businesses taxes, himself. So February~AprilI had to figure what to do with my time since the computer was occupied during most non-school hours by my dad.
- sixothree 5y agoI actually have a boxed copy of DESQview/X on my shelf.
- pkphilip 5y agoAny chance of getting the binaries? Perhaps it can be disassambled