Since 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 3

Since 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.