5 ms·

Many of the people I knew in the beginning of 1990's ended up running either DESQview or OS/2. And that was because they were running either one node bulletin b

Many of the people I knew in the beginning of 1990's ended up running either DESQview or OS/2. And that was because they were running either one node bulletin board system on their only desktop computer or they had a multi node BBS on their dedicated BBS computer. Around that time I had updated from 1200 bps to 2400 bps to 14400 bps modem. Mostly the multitasking was running smooth enough to provide reasonably speedy BBS experience even for the 14k4 caller. The multitasking mostly was visible when the system was building and compressing the QWK archive for offine message reading (Blue Wave FTW).

brk 13y ago
I remember running DESQView '386 for exactly that purpose. A TAG BBS on one session, and then whatever else in another session. It was reasonably amazing at the time to be able to run more than one thing concurrently on your PC.
- jzzskijj 13y ago
  I was constantly listening to modules (first with DMP and later with Cubic Player) and DOS shelling from the player to do something else. That something else being editing ascii/ansi art or programming in Turbo Pascal. Because the module playing was done done in TSR, the players at the time could not switch to the next song in the playlist unless you returned to the player. When the music ended I had to quit the application I was working in and "exit" from DOS shell to give control back to player software. And then back to DOS shell and into the application.
gmuslera 13y ago
In the very beginning of the 90's programmed a BBS and had it running under Desqview. In 1994 had to build a data bank accessible by modem, and based on my bbs to build it, but used OS/2 as multitasker, which made a big difference in stability. In 1996 had to put access to that data via internet, and used the same OS/2 box for both modem access and an internet server with most of the usual services (mail/web/dns/proxy). It was very reliable (really don't remember reboots, maybe it was mostly for upgrades), impressed me when i realized that i created a 16mb vector in that 16mb server with everything running normally, and loved WPS (not sure which today's desktop had so good integration with fs) and rexx (parsing without regexes was good, but later learnt how limited i was).

brk 13y ago

I remember running DESQView '386 for exactly that purpose. A TAG BBS on one session, and then whatever else in another session. It was reasonably amazing at the time to be able to run more than one thing concurrently on your PC.

jzzskijj 13y ago
I was constantly listening to modules (first with DMP and later with Cubic Player) and DOS shelling from the player to do something else. That something else being editing ascii/ansi art or programming in Turbo Pascal. Because the module playing was done done in TSR, the players at the time could not switch to the next song in the playlist unless you returned to the player. When the music ended I had to quit the application I was working in and "exit" from DOS shell to give control back to player software. And then back to DOS shell and into the application.

gmuslera 13y ago

In the very beginning of the 90's programmed a BBS and had it running under Desqview. In 1994 had to build a data bank accessible by modem, and based on my bbs to build it, but used OS/2 as multitasker, which made a big difference in stability. In 1996 had to put access to that data via internet, and used the same OS/2 box for both modem access and an internet server with most of the usual services (mail/web/dns/proxy). It was very reliable (really don't remember reboots, maybe it was mostly for upgrades), impressed me when i realized that i created a 16mb vector in that 16mb server with everything running normally, and loved WPS (not sure which today's desktop had so good integration with fs) and rexx (parsing without regexes was good, but later learnt how limited i was).