[HN Gopher] PC DOS Reimagined ___________________________________________________________________ PC DOS Reimagined Author : ingve Score : 36 points Date : 2020-12-23 11:08 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.pcjs.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.pcjs.org) | curlypaul924 wrote: | I remember when I first learned about multitasking. I think I | read an article in Compute! or PC Magazine about Desqview or | Concurrent DOS, and I remember wondering "Who would ever want to | run two programs at the same time? Nobody has a multitasking | brain!" | loloquwowndueo wrote: | Desqview was acceptable to run a two-line Dial-up BBS on the | same machine. It had stability issues beyond that so when the | need arose for a third line we moved to OS/2 which was | wonderful to multitask DOS applications in. The internet killed | our little BBS before we had a need for four lines and beyond | :) | ghaff wrote: | There was a cottage industry of software to get around DOS' | single-tasking limitations. DoubleDOS was another program | that let you have multiple sessions. There were terminate and | stay resident (TSR) program like Sidekick. | raphlinus wrote: | If you want to match the font of the IBM PC technical | documentation, it's ITC Garamond, not Times. Very characteristic | of the era, Apple also adopted it (in it condensed variant). | eqvinox wrote: | This kinda happened in the UNIX world: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell | Crontab wrote: | As an OS nerd, I find this very interesting. Thanks for posting | it. | kiwidrew wrote: | This is very cool! | | The IBM PC (and clone) hardware was progressing rapidly at the | time: from an 8-bit 8088 @ 4.77Mhz with 64-256K RAM to much much | faster 16-bit 80286/80386 systems @ 16Mhz+ with 2-4MB RAM in just | a few short years. | | As a consequence of this rapid progress, the software of the era | didn't really exist for long enough to get heavily optimized and | [with the exception of certain games] never pushed the PC/XT | hardware to anywhere near its full capabilities. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-12-23 23:00 UTC)