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I 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.
by IncRnd 5y ago
I 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?
- myself248 5y agoRenegade, you heathen! ;)
- a-dub 5y agowas it renegade or remote access that used to play a bleepy rendition of guns n' roses on the pc speaker?
- Firehawke 5y agoRemoteAccess used that as the default Sysop page tune. It could be replaced, though.
- VectorLock 5y agoRenegade really was the apex of the BBS era.
- nope96 5y agoBBS software was very regional and scene specific. A lot of Midwestern Warez guys loved Renegade, and Cott Lang hated that! The really cool warez guys ran PC Board (for some reason), or a Fourm hack which looked cool but seemed buggy. I think Renegade's non-warez scene competition was TAG, WWIV, Wildcat and (of course) Telegard. I kind of liked all of them for various reasons!
- randombits0 5y agoNot heathen, just old. Haha! Edit: my first BBS ran on an Atari 800XL with software written by Jeff Minter. Had to hack up a ring detector for the lame Atari 1200 baud modem. Lol!
- tibbydudeza 5y agoWe used PC-MOS/386 to run our DOS software on 386SX computers with multiple sessions but it tended to corrupt HDD's.
- tssva 5y agoThe source code for PC-MOS/386 version 5.01, the last commercial version, was released under the GPL in 2017 and is available on GitHub.
- tibbydudeza 5y agoThanks - wish we could preserve more software artifacts - the Netware source code would be interesting to look at.
- randombits0 5y agoI stole a 256 user version license from a training machine during training, it’s all in command.com. I never used it, it was just a trophy.
- Clubber 5y agoWWIV! If you registered they would give you compilable source code and I liked being able to customize it. Before that it was C-Net on the C64. Modifying BBSes is what got me into coding.
- jmspring 5y agoWas a big WWIV modder. Never really ran a board myself, but helped several in the East Bay back in the late 80s/early 90s.
- driverdan 5y agoI ran PCBoard under DESQView on a 486 laptop with an external SCSI drive for file storage. Being able to use the BBS at the same time as users was amazing the first time I did it.
- threeio 5y agoI remember trying double-dos to do that as well.. DESQview was much better at multiline
- DogRunner 5y agome too! Running BBS for several lines on one pc was awesome at that time.
- myself248 5y agoI used DesQview for years, and DV/X for a few minutes. It was just an unbearable resource-hog and gave no advantages I cared about. XEyes was entertaining for a minute, but so what? DV was everything a UI should be. Incredibly fast and responsive. Keyboardable for everything. And it stayed the hell out of the way unless you asked it for something. It unlocked the potential of the 80386, and finally gave us the multitasking we'd been promised for years. Better yet, I could use all my same software; it successfully merged my single-purpose DOS applications into a multi-purpose environment that I could use for every aspect of my daily tasks. Windows was a sorry joke in comparison. The DOS experience on Windows was second-class, and terminal software for Windows was never as good or as flexible as Telemate. I only begrudgingly installed Windows because it was required to play with all this "winsock" software I'd been hearing about, since I had no clue how to set up TCP/IP on DOS. (There might've been tutorials in places I didn't know to look, but Windows advice was everywhere.) And single-session BBSing was rapidly going the way of the dodo, so with it went DV. The irony here is that DV/X would've allowed me to do all the things Windows was offering, probably in a better way, if only I'd realized that at the time. More's the pity.
- dbt00 5y agoYou could definitely do DOS TCP/IP stuff, I had a 286 in my dorm room I could telnet with, but it was pretty cranky to set up.
- h2odragon 5y agoKA9QNOS FTW! http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/ http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/ There were other ways too, but i found that code so valuable several times
- wvenable 5y agoI thought I may have been on the only person on the planet with a 286 in my dorm room and using the Internet. I used an application who's name I can't remember but it had a TCP/IP stack and was an email client, news client, and text based web browser for real mode DOS. This was around 1995.