[HN Gopher] DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future ___________________________________________________________________ DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future Author : WoodenChair Score : 213 points Date : 2021-11-30 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lunduke.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (lunduke.substack.com) | pedrow wrote: | This sounds like it would need a lot of RAM to run (or, at least, | more than was common in 1994). Can anyone comment on its system | requirements? | eatfish wrote: | Around that time DOS programs were still being written to fit | within 640KB of memory. However PC's were starting to be | shipped with 2, 4 or even 8MB of RAM - memory really was a | solution in search of a problem at that point. Windows 3.1 was | the primary application for all that memory. But what if you | didn't want, or need, to run Windows 3.1? Well that's where | DESQview fit in. You could task switch between DOS programs | instead using all that sweet memory (but not really, because | DOS doesn't multitask, so 4 switchable ttys of DOS programs is | a better description) | randombits0 wrote: | Well, it was all about exploiting the memory management | features of the 80386. DesqView was an interface to new | hardware architecture that supported multi-tasking the old | model, DOS with all it's memory hacks, exceptionally well. It | was a natural for running the hell out of current model, but it | was doomed to fail to more sophisticated OS products that would | exploit the same power. | | DesqView/X was the same product bundled with some very good X | server/client components. Think of it as an X client as well as | a local system manager running any x86 component. | | The shit was really ahead of it's time. | | Edit: Oh, you asked about resource requirements. Yes, and yes. | Fortunately, DOS binaries aren't large, but it's all relative. | h2odragon wrote: | Far too much? IIRC the first version "technically" could run on | a 286/2mb but they went to 386 only almost immediately. IIRC | 4mb was pretty common by then among anyone who could be using | it. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | By 1992, 1993 most machines were shipping with around 4MB. | The 486DX/50 I got (I believe fall 93) was an 8MB machine. | DoneWithAllThat wrote: | For awhile in the early 90s, McAfee Associates FTP server ran on | a box running DESQview/X. It was the first time you could | download Viruscan/Virushield over the internet, rather than | getting it off a floppy or BBS. | gyoza wrote: | I used this to play games and run my bbs at the same time lmao | pengaru wrote: | I tried doing that but it crashed my system more often than | not. | | Then I got a copy of os/2 warp and never looked back, only | moving on when I received an infomagic 4 cd set of linux | distros. | jweir wrote: | Oh I remember... I was a young lad and I thought this was the | future! So much so I bought stock in Quaterdeck. | | That didn't work out so well. Good to learn those lessons young. | pantulis wrote: | Quarterdeck really had some dope stuff those days, they were | great. Sorry your investment didnt pan out! | emersonrsantos wrote: | Could never play with this because it was a paid product and the | company didn't have any offers on my country. | time4tea wrote: | Interesting, hadnt heard of Desqview for years. Think maybe it | got X server and client mixed up? | ttyyzz wrote: | There's a button that says "Button" :) | pan69 wrote: | I remember running DesqView (without the X) in the early 90's, it | must have been on a 286 (is that possible?), I only got a 486 | around 1994. | | I remember being impressed by the fact that I could run multiple | applications at the same time and switch between them. I think I | ran a BBS at the time (a combination of Frontdoor and something | else... the memory is thin). | | I vaguely remember excitingly showing my parents, probably my | mother, "Look! I can run multiple applications and switch between | them!!!", and she gave me a confused look of "what the hell is | this boy going on about". | driverdan wrote: | DESQView was how most of us BBS SysOps ran multiple nodes. | Being able to multitask DOS programs was amazing at that time. | EricE wrote: | Yes, I knew several guys that used DesqView for running multi- | node BBS's. Before DesqView, it wasn't uncommon for multi-node | BBS guys to have a Novel server and one PC per modem per phone | line. | | I played with but didn't run it - I was running Maximus on OS/2 | at the time :) | tptacek wrote: | Yep! This is me! Both DesqView and DesqView/X --- because I had | a Renegade BBS with Frontdoor. | tobinfricke wrote: | Same! Before switching from DesqView to OS/2. Those were the | days! :-) | tptacek wrote: | I, too, switched to OS/2. And then back. :) | emag wrote: | Oh, wow. Blast from the past. Let's see... Opus-CBCS, then | QuickBBS with FrontDoor, then RemoteAccess with FrontDoor, | at some point I was convinced to switch to D'Bridge. All | eventually under DesqView for a few years, then under OS/2 | until I went off to college... | | I bet I still have all the floppies I saved everything to | in my garage. Alas, the SyQuest 88MB removable disk drive | (in all its SCSI glory) that I eventually ran everything | off of once that "huge" 20MB Seagate drive filled up bit | the dust a few years ago. | pan69 wrote: | It was bugging me and I had to look it up. I was running | Frontdoor with RemoteAccess. I have no memory of how it all | worked though. What I do remember is; making ANSI screens | with TheDraw and chatting with visitors who were dialing in | (if I had any). lol. | fb03 wrote: | omg you took me down a memory lane with that ANSI editing | application. TheDraw was awesome and so easy to create and | use blocks and coloring and whatnot. A must have if you | wanted to try to do ansi/ascii art and also generate some | screens for your ghetto local BBS. | | thank you! | tobiasbischoff wrote: | I was running a 4 line BBS on this back in the days. The | multitasking abilities where unreal back then. Literally made 4 | PCs running 24/7 into one. | | Edit: Nevermind, i was running the older, DOS-based version | IncRnd wrote: | I never used DESQview/X, though I knew about it, of course. I | used DESQview, which was absolutely head and shoulders above | everything else that was DOS-based. DV turned a single instance | DOS machine into something far more. It was like I was back in | University with the ability to swap between multiple terminals. | Except the main difference was increased speed. It seemed as fast | as the Cray I had used. It wasn't, of course, but there was no | delay after I would press enter! I had the entire workstation | computer to myself. A database job in one tab (foxpro!). A print | job to a farm of rena printers in another tab (custom mail- | merge). Ah, those were the days. lol. Back to the modern and more | interesting problems of 2021 :) | myself248 wrote: | I used DesQview for years, and DV/X for a few minutes. It was | just an unbearable resource-hog and gave no advantages I cared | about. XEyes was entertaining for a minute, but so what? | | DV was everything a UI should be. Incredibly fast and | responsive. Keyboardable for everything. And it stayed the hell | out of the way unless you asked it for something. It unlocked | the potential of the 80386, and finally gave us the | multitasking we'd been promised for years. Better yet, I could | use all my same software; it successfully merged my single- | purpose DOS applications into a multi-purpose environment that | I could use for every aspect of my daily tasks. | | Windows was a sorry joke in comparison. The DOS experience on | Windows was second-class, and terminal software for Windows was | never as good or as flexible as Telemate. I only begrudgingly | installed Windows because it was required to play with all this | "winsock" software I'd been hearing about, since I had no clue | how to set up TCP/IP on DOS. (There might've been tutorials in | places I didn't know to look, but Windows advice was | everywhere.) And single-session BBSing was rapidly going the | way of the dodo, so with it went DV. | | The irony here is that DV/X would've allowed me to do all the | things Windows was offering, probably in a better way, if only | I'd realized that at the time. | | More's the pity. | dbt00 wrote: | You could definitely do DOS TCP/IP stuff, I had a 286 in my | dorm room I could telnet with, but it was pretty cranky to | set up. | h2odragon wrote: | KA9QNOS FTW! | | http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/ | | There were other ways too, but i found that code so | valuable several times | wvenable wrote: | I thought I may have been on the only person on the planet | with a 286 in my dorm room and using the Internet. I used | an application who's name I can't remember but it had a | TCP/IP stack and was an email client, news client, and text | based web browser for real mode DOS. This was around 1995. | Clubber wrote: | I used DESQview to run a multi-node BBS back in the day. I | tried using Windows 3.1 but it was dog slow in comparison. | randombits0 wrote: | This is where I used it as well. It was that, PC-MOS, or | later, OS/2. | | So, Wildcat! or PC-Board? | Clubber wrote: | WWIV! If you registered they would give you compilable | source code and I liked being able to customize it. Before | that it was C-Net on the C64. Modifying BBSes is what got | me into coding. | jmspring wrote: | Was a big WWIV modder. Never really ran a board myself, | but helped several in the East Bay back in the late | 80s/early 90s. | tibbydudeza wrote: | We used PC-MOS/386 to run our DOS software on 386SX | computers with multiple sessions but it tended to corrupt | HDD's. | tssva wrote: | The source code for PC-MOS/386 version 5.01, the last | commercial version, was released under the GPL in 2017 | and is available on GitHub. | tibbydudeza wrote: | Thanks - wish we could preserve more software artifacts - | the Netware source code would be interesting to look at. | driverdan wrote: | I ran PCBoard under DESQView on a 486 laptop with an | external SCSI drive for file storage. Being able to use the | BBS at the same time as users was amazing the first time I | did it. | myself248 wrote: | Renegade, you heathen! ;) | a-dub wrote: | was it renegade or remote access that used to play a | bleepy rendition of guns n' roses on the pc speaker? | VectorLock wrote: | Renegade really was the apex of the BBS era. | randombits0 wrote: | Not heathen, just old. Haha! | | Edit: my first BBS ran on an Atari 800XL with software | written by Jeff Minter. Had to hack up a ring detector | for the lame Atari 1200 baud modem. Lol! | threeio wrote: | I remember trying double-dos to do that as well.. DESQview | was much better at multiline | DogRunner wrote: | me too! Running BBS for several lines on one pc was awesome | at that time. | sedatk wrote: | > Just about everything (including resizing and moving windows) | can be done entirely from a keyboard without ever touching a | mouse. The mouse works everywhere, but you don't need to take | your hands off the keyboard if you don't want to. | | That's literally how Windows has worked since 1.0. You can still | resize and move windows without leaving the keyboard. The | shortcut key is Alt-Space if you're curious. | Karunamon wrote: | If you have a retro PC or a quality emulator you can get ahold of | this and play with it. DOSBox won't cut it since an extended | memory manager, specifically QEMM, is required and doesn't | emulate well. Use a full VM or something like PCem. | | https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x | jd3 wrote: | I first learned about DVX from another HN commenter a few years | ago -- i was in the middle of an OS pattern archiving project at | the time, so if you're interested in pantomiming the DVX ui, here | are the raw xpm/pngs | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045149 | | http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/OEM/DVX/ | femto113 wrote: | Ah from the time of great widget wars, when Motif and OPEN LOOK | were battling for GUI supremacy. I was vehemently team OL (via | Sun's OpenWindows flavor) and absolutely loathed how bulky the | borders felt on Motif windows. | sparcpile wrote: | Nathan Lineback has an article with more screenshots on his site. | His review is over 20 years old now. | http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html | mbreese wrote: | I used this for a while. It was a great system for running a | couple of DOS BBS instances (on two lines![1]) in the background | while also running Windows 3.1. | | Although, I can't imagine that this use-case was all that | popular. It was a great glimpse of what was possible on the | hardware of the day, but still seemed like more of a gimmick. But | given that we run everything on virtual servers these days, it | was really ahead of its time. | | [1] PCBoard, if you want to know. Writing door programs in the | PCBoard language was my first real taste of programming. | tlack wrote: | I loved the PPE modding system. I wish I could find my old | PCBoard software! | pridkett wrote: | Like many people in this thread, I used DESQview for BBSes and | later DESQview/X, but there wasn't much graphical that I could | find for it. Eventually I moved to OS/2 because it was easier to | program, but it still holds a fond place in my heart. I just wish | I would've realized the real power of X back when I was on | DESQview/X, not that it would've mattered with only one PC in the | house. | | A decade later when I got to CMU for grad school I was talking to | a professor when I saw he was using DESQview/X as his desktop | OS...in 2004. | | I thought that was wild until I met a cluster of folks at IBM | Research still running OS/2 in 2012 when my office got moved to | Yorktown Heights. | | Such pleasant memories...but I think I'll stick with modern | desktop environments. | spullara wrote: | I was working at a small manufacturing company in Tennessee over | my summer break from college in I think 1992 and they had decided | to buy DESQview because it looked cool. It really was amazing | multitasking our netware apps on it. | andrewstuart wrote: | Surely there's a technical visionary behind this. I wonder who | and what the story was of its creation? | kloch wrote: | DESQview/X was amazing and fun. | | > it would be quite nice to be able to run DESQview using newer | graphics cards (read: higher resolution) | | This was by far it's biggest limitation. At the time interest in | higher than SVGA resolution was just beginning. Support for the | latest high resolution cards/modes was limited (though I think | later versions had generic VESA driver support which helped | somewhat. Don't forget your monitor also had to support higher | resolutions and large high resolution monitors were very | expensive. | vzaliva wrote: | I remember running long compilations (~1hr) under DESQview while | doing some editing or even playing siple DOS games in parallel. | It was amazin. DESQview/X never caught up with me or anyone I | knew. | canadian_tired wrote: | Oh wow. I fondly remember DesqView (no /X) and being completely | amazed. I think around that time the larger buzz was around SCO | Unix. | pavlov wrote: | The article trips into the age-old trap of X11's client/server | terminology being the opposite of expectations. | | In X, the server is the graphical terminal (i.e. your computer) | and the client is the remote computer executing the program. The | idea is that display and UI devices are the static resources | being served to any number of programs. | dmead wrote: | I came here to say this. either the author was confused by the | features or they chose to reverse it to make it easier to | understand. | pjmlp wrote: | I remember it from Dr Dobbs ads, never got to use it though. | agumonkey wrote: | just ran into that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_lfpdK7bQM | | 'DESQView/X 2.1 (x86) Motif running under VirtualBox' | h2odragon wrote: | I had a DesqView/X Tshirt for the longest time; wore it to | several shows and only had one person recognize it. | | I got it at the COMDEX Chicago show where they were doing their | first demos (nothing for sale today, sorry) and the GEOS booth | got kidnapped by the AOL team for their deal. Nearly had to | tackle the guy for it but I just knew that this was a "damn that | shoulda worked" doomed product right then. | | Edit: As I recall, they were far more interested in playing with | their R/C blimp that morning than in talking to customers. I had | a spiel all wound up about "I can put copies of your software in | $X offices this month, if it works for our app: gimme a demo | copy" but never got to deliver it. | mikestew wrote: | I have that t-shirt, because I was at that COMDEX! (I'd say | that such an admission dates me, but admitting to having _ever_ | attended a COMDEX is going to date you.) | | It is disappointing about the booth personnel's lack of | interest, but you did at least milk a blimp out of them, right? | IIRC, we had about as much engagement when we talked to them, | but at least we got swag (granted, the "R" in "R/C" stood for | "wired remote", not "radio"). Stopped at McDonald's on the way | home to Indianapolis to fill it with helium. Played with it for | a month, then lost interest, like most swag. Still, probably | the best swag we've received. | | I used DESQview for years, but the /X was doomed to fall under | the wheels of the Windows 95 marketing machine, or just the MS | marketing machine in general. Even I didn't use it all that | much, having moved on to OS/2 Warp when it came out. | dang wrote: | Wow, looks like this has never had an HN thread before. One | interesting submission (https://archive.org/details/desqview-x- | booklet) but no comments: | | _DesqView /X: A Technical Perspective [book]_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061438 - Jan 2014 (0 | comments) | wk_end wrote: | Sounds amazing. Why wasn't it a success? Was performance bad on | the systems of the time? Priced too high? Lack of marketing | muscle? | ilaksh wrote: | Personally I think that it was just too awesome for most people | to appreciate due to stupidity and lack of knowledge. | | Being able to run X Windows programs an DOS and Windows 3 is | amazing. I am sure there are lots of ways it could have been | taken advantage of. The majority of potential customers were | just too dumb though. | | There doesn't always need to be a good reason for something to | be unpopular. Sometimes, it's just because the flock of sheep | were going in a different direction. Maybe they were going that | way because the shepard got a bribe. | WoodenChair wrote: | There's some information on Wikipedia about the company's | decline: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#Decline_of_DESQview | narrator wrote: | Seems like the pre-Linux trend of nickel and diming for | everything, especially tcp/ip network connectivity | contributed heavily to the failure of the platform. | bboreham wrote: | No application software. Went up against Windows 3. | a-dub wrote: | pc market also didn't have much use for X11 then either. i | think this even predated xfree86. | | would be curious if it actually would work with remote x | clients on the unix machines of the time. (assuming they had | complete X11 implementations) | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Likely few potential customers really needed the features it | offered. X11 support only made sense if you had Unix around | already, and if that was the case, you were probably investing | in Unix workstations anyways? | | The workstation market was hot around then. Even Atari and | Commodore tried to bring out lower end 68020 & 68030 Unix | workstations. Until Windows 95 and NT rolled out it seemed like | maybe the future belonged to Unix. But that didn't pan out, | really, not til later anyways. | | Re: price $275 in 1992, it seems: | https://techmonitor.ai/techonology/quarterdecks_desqviewx_du... | | So not cheap, but not insanely priced. | | But in 1993 I was also installing Linux for free on my 486. And | I even had a working X11 environment. | cbm-vic-20 wrote: | $275 was much, _much_ cheaper than a Unix workstation. Linux | with X was only a year away, though, and that put a nail in | the coffin of DV /X as cheap-PC-as-X-server. | | Universities in the early 90s had networked X services | _everywhere_. | kelnos wrote: | > _Universities in the early 90s had networked X services | everywhere._ | | I was definitely born a little bit too late. I started | university in the very-late 90s, and nearly all the | "public" (as in, open to all students) computer labs ran | Windows NT (and later Win2k). (At least they were set up | with networked home directories, so students could easily | access saved coursework wherever they were.) | | But there was one lab in particular that I enjoyed, though: | one of my professors had a computer lab that he had de- | facto control over, and all the machines ran FreeBSD (his | one true OS love). I would ssh back into my dorm-room | computer (running Red Hat, I think?), so I could run my | personal X11 apps on the X server on the FreeBSD box I was | using. Unfortunately I only had access to that lab for a | few semesters, as access was granted only while taking some | particular classes. Those machines had a bunch of hardware | design simulators and Verilog & VHDL compilers on them; it | was mainly an ECE hardware design lab. | sliken wrote: | Being compatible with everything (X11, dos, and windows) meant | zero native apps. Microsoft tried with Windows for Workgroups, | but eventually got better at networking and multitasking and | most importantly had many native apps. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-30 23:00 UTC)