4 ms·
I read about the multitasking of DOS programs in some round-up of DOS multitasking systems (DeskView et al.), and convinced my boss to fund experimentally addin
by cardiffspaceman 4y ago
I read about the multitasking of DOS programs in some round-up of DOS multitasking systems (DeskView et al.), and convinced my boss to fund experimentally adding 4 MiB of RAM and a Windows 3.0 license to my 386-based clone. I got a build (cross-assemble) of my code going, and then entered the Brief editor, and pondered what exactly I had enabled. Then an in-house utility was invoked from the makefile to download my code into the target, and my whole system froze. Thus endeth the experiment.
- lproven 4y agoAnything that hit the metal directly could cause problems, yes. You had to be pretty careful and test stuff first. TBH I didn't use these multitasking tools much. I was a support guy then; I worked on other people's PCs so I needed to know how to use the built-in tools to best advantage. I could not rely on additional apps, utilities, etc. because the PC I was fixing almost certainly wouldn't have them. Late in that era I carried around a wallet with about 20 floppies full of freeware tools and utilities for this reason. But for me it was occasionally very handy to be able to go and make a directory, or format a diskette or something, while in the middle of something in an app. But I wouldn't try something that wrote to the hardware, do file transfers or something. Serial ports if you were very careful to set them up so they didn't share IRQs, which of course on the PC was the normal standard config -- COM1: shared IRQ 4 with COM3:, and COM2: shared IRQ 3 with COM4: While LPT1: was on IRQ 7 and why on Earth can I still remember this 35 years later? >_<