Exactly this. It was almost like having your own little DesQview -- windowed floating text editor, DOS shell, scripting language, and a really full-featured dia

Exactly this. It was almost like having your own little DesQview -- windowed floating text editor, DOS shell, scripting language, and a really full-featured dialer, all on three floppies. (The fourth was a revolutionary display-a-GIF-while-it-downloads program, which would let you bail on the transfer early if the file wasn't shaping up to be what you wanted, or bail at 98% if you were shady and didn't want to use up the download credit because the board only counted completed transfers. It was barely related to the rest of TeleMate and had to be shelled out to, since it took over the display.)