DesqView/X: Night of the Living Dead Codebases

Pazuzues writes "I found something that you could say peaked my interest. It seems Symantec (purchasers of former company Quarterdeck) has release DeskView/X into public domain and can be downloaded now. DesqView/X was a GUI and OS extender that installed into DOS very much like MS Windows does. This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even gateway serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals. It was way ahead of its time and is a pretty decent toy to play with if you have a old 486 laying around. Anyways there is a petition being started that is petitioning Symantec to release the source code as OpenSource. I think this is a really good idea and could possiably help alot of other existing projects like WINE for example. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"

Comments

No Brainer

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, are there any constructive comments that can be added to this discussion besides "sign the petition!"?

Not to troll, but I think we all know what needs to be done and why it would be a good thing to do it.

Re:No Brainer

[slashzero]

Get Freedos, its an opensource version of dos and works nicely with old dos apps, I don't remember their site something like freedos.org or something but they have ton of utilities on they site too

Where can I find DOS?

[MiTEG]

I have an old 486 lying around, but I don't have any DOS install disks lying around. Anyone where I could find them? This sounds like it would be cool to try out. Unless maybe the original win95 install disks allow you to install DOS only?

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

You want FreeDOS, free as in beer and GPL too. It works very well.

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use free and open-sourced OpenDOS instead of M$-DOS. If you really want to use M$-DOS, I think they still sell it at CDW.

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[really?]

Have a look at:

http://www.bootdisk.com

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this helps:
http://www.powerload.fsnet.co.uk/bootdisk.htm

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just zip the entire \Windows\Command directory from a working installation and then unzip on the target disk as it as \DOS. You also want HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE from the \windows directory.

You can then use SYS to make the disk bootable, and you've got a DOS installation.

(Although, I don't know if they ever made a version of QEMM which works with the version of DOS that comes with Win98 (7.1?). I know there was a DOS95 version.)

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

freaking crack smoking moderators. If you need DOS to run this, how is it off topic?

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[screwtheNSA]

Okay, I have original DOS 6.22 stored for the next nuclear winter we will have(might need to boot an old 80286 box after that balloon goes up).

I also "might" have a copy or two of DR-DOS someplace in the attic<ugh!>.

Mail me, let me know if you need a COPY of these, okay?

Send your request to my spam mail site: spamandnospam-ka9uce@netscape.net.com.org

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not flamebait, but the way moderation is done around here, you probably have kids young enough that they've never used real DOS moderating stuff that they don't have a clue about.

Not that it stops anyone on slashdot from talking out their collective asses....

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[m0rph3us0]

Here is an easy way to get DOS from any Windows 9X, into safe mode with command prompt. (DOS) and then attrib -sr msdos.sys (i think thats the attributes you need to remove) and then edit the msdos.sys file you will see a line that says BootGUI = 1 || BootGui = YES simply change to 0/NO, reapply attributes to the file, and reboot... suddenly you no longer get the Windows GUI. Need windows? Just type win from the command line like in the old 3.1 days

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[broody]

Why not just use FreeDOS?

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are a MSDN subscriber or know one, you can download MS-DOS from their web site.

Re:Where can I find DOS?

[yeOldeSkeptic]

I have an old 486 lying around, but I don't have any DOS install disks lying around. Anyone where I could find them? This sounds like it would be cool to try out. ... ...

What do you need DOS for? If you are looking for coolness, hike over to Linux From Scratch and install Linux onto your 486's hard drive directly from source code!

RE: Desqview

[sinnerDOTcom]

I remember having to use DESQVIEW to multitask when I was running my BBS off of MSDOS.. Ahh, full screen ANSI menu's and RIP graphics to boot. I want my bbs, and I want it now.

BTW, i'll "deffentntnetnly" check this out.

Re:Ugh, the grammar!

[painkillr]

Hmmm, grammar?

How about:

"It's clear..."

Confused

[OutlawDrake]

If it's been released into the public domain, why does it need to be "Open Sourced"?

Re:Confused

[buchalka]

We need it to be open source so we can use and abuse the source code.

duh!

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

It's simple -- this product must be open sourced so that the socialist zealots from around this dump will feel vindicated and have a reason not to eat a gun tonight.

Needless to say, nobody outside Slashdot wants this product open sourced.

Re:Confused

[damiam]

I can't get to the site, so I'm not certain, but they probably just released the binaries into the public domain. I guess we could decompile it to get the source, but that takes a lot of effort and produces strange code.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Because to stay useful and compatible X-extensions need to be made for this. XFree 4 changed a lot of things.

Re:Confused

[CaseStudy]

The article poster doesn't appear to understand the concepts of public domain and open source.

Releasing the binaries without licensing restrictions is not the same as putting the program in the public domain (I don't think you can put binaries in the public domain without putting source as well, as one copyright covers both). The major difference is whether derivative works require permission from a copyright holder.

If the program is in the public domain, open source licenses are inapplicable, because it's no longer anybody's to impose licensing restrictions on. Hence the question.

Re:Confused

[Jennifer Ever]

I assume only the binary has been released (I can't get to the site to verify that, though). Release the source, and I'm sure someone out there would continue development.

Re:Confused

[joto]

It's obviously you who are confused. Releasing the source code to something has nothing to do with releasing the binary code to it when it comes to copyright law.

Please come back to the discussion once you have read something more than the GPL.

Re:Confused

[CaseStudy]

I wouldn't say it has nothing to do with it. I haven't read the appropriate CFRs lately, so I don't know the Copyright Office's attitude toward it, but I would be surprised if a binary merited a separate copyright, since there's no additional expression contained within.

Re:Confused

[Radical Rad]

I would tend to agree with you since it is about like translating a literary work from english to french then claiming the french version is not covered under the original copyright. OTOH we've all seen some of the stupid things our government can do.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

He will..., when you install Windows XP 2525

Re:Confused

[Sun]

If the program is in the public domain, open source licenses are inapplicable, because it's no longer anybody's to impose licensing restrictions on. Hence the question.

I disagree. If the program (and sources) are under public domain, you can make your own release under whatever license you want. That's what "public domain" means.

If you have not made significant changes to the sources, however, people are highly likely to prefer the original, with which THEY can do whatever THEY want.

Re:Confused

[joto]

Well, feel free to reverse engineer it (e.g. translate to another language) if you want to. There's no one who is going to stop you, since the binary code is in the public domain. But no legal twistery can force them to give you the source code unless they choose to do so. It's the binary that's in the public domain. Period.

DesqView/X and serial port sharing...

[nedron]

Actually, one of the most usefull features of DesqView/X was the ability to remotely access serial ports on another machine. I used to work in a customer service group who's application was only avilable via an RS232 connection. Each workstation was limited to two physical serial lines that had been run from X.25 nodes. A number of us installed DV/X and shared our ports out when we weren't working. This allowed you to grab unused remote ports and open 4 or more serial connections with our mainframe apps. Very handy.

Public Domain *is* Open Source

[Orasis]

If code is in the public domain anyone is free to do whatever they want with it. Therefore it is by definition Open Source. I'm sure if you check out the OSD on opensource.org it will include Public Domain.

--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[buchalka]

Releasing a product to the public domain does not necessarily mean realising the source code.

Open source includes the source code!

That's the difference.

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[dhogaza]

Except apparently they put the *binaries* in the public domain. Instead of assuming the person posting this is a clueless idiot, why not probe a bit deeper with a click of your mouse to find out the whole story?

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[Christopher B. Brown]

If what they have released to the public domain is just the binaries, then that's all that's "public domain."

If they have not released source code, and didn't license the binaries under some arrangement that gives you the right to demand source code (have we ever heard of a license like that???), then what they have done with the binaries has nothing to do with the accessibility of source code.

Ob-DesqView reference: It was a pretty neat system; at the time I used it, OS/2 was an alternative that was, for my purposes, preferable since it actually actively resisted crashes, which was important when coding fairly wildly-pointered C code...

The last release that I saw was not as stable as the second-last release, which was unfortunate. That might have been Microsoft playing their Windows isn't done until Foo crashes, consistently games....

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[CaseStudy]

You can't put just the binaries in the public domain. You can release them under an unrestricted license, but that's not the same thing.

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[innocent_white_lamb]

You can't put just the binaries in the public domain.

Why not?

"These binaries are public domain." If that statement is made then you can do what ever you want with the binaries, including ripping 'em apart if you wish.

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[dvdeug]

Why can't you put binaries in the public domain? I see no reason you can't renounce your claim to copyright on a program binary.

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[CaseStudy]

I should have bolded "just."

What you're really putting in public domain is the copyright. As far as I'm aware, one copyright covers both source and binaries. So if you put the copyright in the public domain, the source goes with it.

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[CrazyBusError]

Err.. Hello? Anyone remember the old Amiga PD disks? I certainly don't remember any source being included or available with them?

Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source

[ptrourke]

It isn't "Open Source" unless the code is readable - you know, unless the SOURCE CODE is OPEN to be read and modified.

My interest was piqued

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi -

Your interest may have been peaked, but mine was piqued :)

TWR

Re:My interest was piqued

[pivo]

We don't take kindlee to spellers 'round here. Take 'yer colege lerned spellin and git outta here, city boy!

Re:My interest was piqued

[OleSarge]

Well, my pappy always told me that anyone who couldn't/wouldn't use the language properly was either "stupid", meaning he/she couldn't learn, or was "ignorant", meaning he/she hadn't learned. In the first case, there's nothing to be done. In the second case, some people are just to lazy to learn and/or apply what they have learned. BTW, I'm not a "city boy" either, and "college" has nothing to do with speaking/writing correctly. Tata

DesqView was really cool.

[burtonator]

Back in the day...

... my "modern" first computer was a 386DX... basically because it was 32 bit and had a math coprocessor. Damn that thing was cool. I had computers before that but this was the first one I thought was da bomb.

After a while I would tweak DOS to get the MAXIMIM amount of conventional memory 640k out of it. Quarterdeck Memory Manager did an AMAZING job of moving things around and forcing them to load in the correct memory segment.

It was always amazing to see how well it would increase your memory.

I would run QMM, DesqView for multitasking and Norton Commander as my filemanager, and QModem to get into my neighborhood BBS.

QMM was needed with DesqView because it required a lot of resources.

I was S000 37337!

Man I wish I had Linux 2.4 and Debian back then ! :) I wouldn't have all these wasted brain cells which know every single bug in DOS/QMM. :)

Kevin

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[garcia]

I used to use it on a 386SX-16 for running a BBS. The footprint was a lot less than Win3.11 and it ran reasonably well on that machine w/5mb of RAM.

At the time the /X meant nothing to me. It just looked cool when the user would login and see the OS listed as Desqview/X ;)

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[JabberWokky]

I would run QMM, DesqView for multitasking and Norton Commander as my filemanager, and QModem to get into my neighborhood BBS.

For that era, I ran QMM, DesqView, XTree, {COMMO}, QEdit, SideKick. My BBSes ran everything from homebrew software (on my Apple ][) to Searchlight, Renegade, Minix (one node, on a floppy, users logged in as root. Every so often, I'd swap the floppy for a freah install). {COMMO} spent some serious time logged into a variety of *nix boxen, and two VAXes. Those were the days when if you asked nice, people gave you accounts on business machines or uni boxes across the country. Usenet had yet to be hit with it's first spam, FidoNet could transfer files across the globe, and everybody knew who uunet was. Those were good days.

I wouldn't have all these wasted brain cells which know every single bug in DOS/QMM. :)

Hehehe.. I used to be able to COPY CON PROGRAM.COM and write some decent code with alt-numpad sequences. I *know* there are some other /.ers out there that memorized all the various int 20h and int 21h paramaters.

It's that kinda thing that makes me feel good about Open Source (not just Linux). Popping in and adding mousewheel support to my favorite image viewer, adding a few features to my AIM client... also the "freedom of *nix" on my desktop now, with shell scripts, cron jobs, regex combos flying at the command line.

Heh... maybe *these* are "Good old days" too.

--
Evan

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Safety Cap]

QMM was needed with DesqView because it required a lot of resources

Actually, it's QEMM (E=expanded), and it was required because the way the system was paged out in protected mode. QRAM was the "memory manager" for 286s, which unfortunately only had one virtual machine.

Man, I thought that part of my life was dead -- I used to work at Quarterdeck (it was my first "real" job) on their help desk - I was employee #23 in that department.

Sigh. Those were the good old days: writing white papers, messing with the Desqview API, staying up till all hours doing QC for the new releases, watching the programmers write and tweak their code using debug ...

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm...386DXs did not have FP coprocessors...the 387 FPU chip was available, but not many machines included one...neither did the 486SX have a FPU

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

no you didn't skeleton boy.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I was S000 37337! "

Not if you were running DOS. The really imaginative work was being done on Amigas at that time.

No offense or anything, we've all got PC's now, but back then, there wasn't any software worth having on a PC.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[uradu]

> I was S000 37337!
> Man I wish I had Linux 2.4 and Debian back then ! :)

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the really 7337 hackers back then were busy writing Amiga demos (and zillion disk copier progs). Many of them went on to become part of the first generation of Linux hackers. The closest thing to the Linux community (in terms of size and enthusiasm) back then was the Amiga community. The only ones bothering with the PC were Leisure Suit Larry addicts.

-

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I was S000 37337!

I think you meen 31337. I don't know what "ETEET" is.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[legis]

> QMM was needed with DesqView because it required a lot of resources Actaully it is QEMM. You also need it because QEMM have special hooks for DESQview that other memory managers don't.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[jfunk]

Yes, that's why Linux was first developed on Amigas.

Man, where would you *ever* get such an idea?

To the original poster: Linux *was* available back then. I ran SLS and, later on, Slackware on my 386DX-33.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[legis]

> QMM was needed with DesqView because it required a lot of resources. Actually it is QEMM. You also need it because QEMM have special hooks for DESQview which other memory managers don't.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[legis]

I remember DESQview fondly. I used it for many years and refuse to move to Win 3.x until there were no new DOS apps. DESQview was a really advanced multitasking system as compared to Win 3.x because it actually does preemptive mutitasking. It also allows you to adjust the time slice (called clock ticks in DESQview jargon) on the fly.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man I wish I had Linux 2.4 and Debian back then

What's the difference for Debian? You still feel like you're stuck in the late 80s, waiting for those slow-poke retards to finally release another stable version.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[CrabCakeJimmy2k]

Thank you for saving me the time of pointing that out.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

yep.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[DerekLyons]

I used to use it on a 386SX-16 for running a BBS. The footprint was a lot less than Win3.11 and it ran reasonably well on that machine w/5mb of RAM.

Reminds me of a tagline that used to float around the BBS's:

Window's Multitasks! (In a Desqview Window.)

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[xtremex]

Hey! I played Leisure Suit Larry on my Atari 800XL!
That was one of the 5 computers I had at the time. (Commie 64, 128D, Atari 800XL, TRS-80, Amiga 3000).
The Atari tried to play catchup w/ the Commie, but they were too little, too late.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the OP was saying that he had the i387 unit installed, not that the 386 had a FP unit.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would run QMM, DesqView for multitasking and Norton Commander as my filemanager, and QModem to get into my neighborhood BBS.

Damn, you were living the same life I was, and I imagine the lives of many other people here.

BTW, if you miss the days of Norton Commander, check out FAR, a killer NC clone that supports LFN. http://www.rarsoft.com/far_manager.htm

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Bert64]

And use Amiga owners could quite easily run a BBS in the background while getting on with other things, no need to buy any third party software to let us multitask!

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[byran lei]

>Sorry to burst your bubble, but the really 7337 hackers back then were
>busy writing Amiga demos (and zillion disk copier progs). Many of them
>went on to become part of the first generation of Linux hackers.
>
>
Bullshit. The really 7337 hackers were on the Atari 8-bits and C64's. These guys were cranking out demos that still make the Amiga stuff look lame.

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[uradu]

> Bullshit. The really 7337 hackers were on the Atari 8-bits and C64's.

Not at the time the original poster mentioned, not anymore. Flamebait or not, but during the mid- to late 80s there was the Amiga, and then there was everything else.

-

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[uradu]

> Yes, that's why Linux was first developed on Amigas.
> Man, where would you *ever* get such an idea?

From being there, mainly. Linux originally evolved from Minix, which existed on many more platforms than just the PC. When Linus started dabbling on the kernel, the Amiga had already peaked and was declining, what with Commodore not doing anything whatsoever. Linus either saw the writing on the wall, or maybe he always was a clone guy, I don't know. I'm not saying everyone was an Amiga nut back then. In hindsight he certainly chose wisely.

-

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[jfunk]

Your evidence doesn't actually make the correlation. Linus used a PC and Linux was a few years old before it ran on the Amiga.

I don't think any of Linus' decisions back then had anything to do with Amigas.

Do you really like Amigas *that* much?

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[uradu]

> Linus used a PC and Linux was a few years old
> before it ran on the Amiga.

I was talking about Minix, which ran on the Amiga before Linux ran on the PC.

> I don't think any of Linus' decisions back then had anything to do with Amigas.

You're most likely right, and I did say as much.

> Do you really like Amigas *that* much?

Did, not do. There simply was no equivalent to Linux today during the late 80s on the PC, and certainly not before the 386. If you wanted a preemptively multitasking system with flat memory that was supremely hackable and yet affordable to the average home user, there was little choice besides the Amiga. In terms of pure MHz the early 386s might have been ok, but given their plain framebuffer (VGA if you were lucky) displays and no sound to speak of, their overall performance quite sucked.

Eventually though, the PC hardware far surpassed anything the Amiga had to offer, and the plethora of OS choices made the switch to Intel a no-brainer. Today I would certainly need very strong arguments to move away from the PC.

-

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[garyrich]

hello..... Mike, right

Re:DesqView was really cool.

[Safety Cap]

The freakiest thing I ever saw (well, one of...) was when I was testing S3 video cards with Stealth and it was crapping out every time (I think we had to x=a000-cfff, or something to fix).

DanSpear came over, fired up simdeb, paged through a bunch of hex, CHANGED ONE VALUE and then the damn thing worked.

WTF?! At that point, I knew I'd never amount to anything.

big surprise

[damiam]

$ host disvr.cjb.net
disvr.cjb.net A 66.24.22.15

$ host 66.24.22.15
Name: syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com
Address: 66.24.22.15

$ ping syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com
PING syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com (66.24.22.15): 56 data bytes

--- syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

Run your site on a Road Runner cable modem and you KNOW it'll get slashdotted :-)
Anyone got a mirror?

Re:big surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

try this link

http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html

Re:big surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com is actually my box, and I disabled replying of PING packets for security reasons.

Re:big surprise

[bob-o-buds.com]

Well... it's down regardless :)

Is this that important?

[willybur]

Is it really as useful as people think? If its abandonware, then it has fallen so out of date that there is no point in keeping it hidden. Why would Borland release Turbo Pascal 5.5 and Turbo C(++?) 1.01 into the public domain when the "newer" (but still really old) versions of those apps are still private? Because the old ones have lost so much functionality relatively.

Ancient X apps and Windows 3.1 applications? That's great if you're still coding in outdated setups. Current standards seem much more complex, open-ended and harder to emulate. Wine is probably not perfect for a reason.

Re:Is this that important?

[byran lei]

>Ancient X apps and Windows 3.1 applications? That's great if you're
>still coding in outdated setups. Current standards seem much more
>complex, open-ended and harder to emulate. Wine is probably not
>perfect for a reason.
>
>
Yeah it's a real bitch that people are more interested in DesqView/X than in .NET isn't it?

Re:Is this that important?

[fliplap]

Some people still use hardware this old. There's a lot of really good uses for this sort of thing. But this software aside, I wish more companies would do this sort of thing.

For example I have a couple of old Macs, including an SE/30 here. You can pick them up for $5 at University surplus stores. All of them are running MacOS right now, because Apple gives away MacOS 7.5.3. But they still haven't started giving away A/UX, Apple's UNIX for Mac. The neat thing about A/UX is that it could still run most MacOS applications.

As I recall Apple won't even sell anyone the OS anymore, and even when they did it was $795. The point is, there's a lot of people out there that would like to try this software, and many wouldn't even mind paying a small fee for the right to download it. But to simply refuse to sell something anymore is just wasteful.

Re:Is this that important?

[legis]

> Ancient X apps and Windows 3.1 applications?

Actually there are no X apps bundled with DESQview X. It is just a graphically version of DESQview with a built in X server.

Re:Is this that important?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that Apple paid a pretty substantial royalty to AT&T (etc) for the rights the UNIX code in A/UX. This sort of clusterfuckery is exactly why GNU and Linux got so popular. Anyway, don't hold your breath waiting for AU/X.

Re:Is this that important?

[Enahs]

You'd probably be surprised . . . code written for the WINE project, along with curent X implementations, could probably help out a freed Deskqview/X (and, in the case of undocumented Win calls, which still exist in Windows, could help the WINE project immensely, I'm sure.)

Re:Is this that important?

[Nelson]

The desqview code itself isn't important. There might be pockets (no doubt there are) where this will matter but for the most part it doesn't.

I think the big thing is the shift in thinking that some big companies are starting to take on. A company cannot support a product forever, for the most part. It also cannot afford to not support products. At some point in time, and it's probably a lot earlier than it has been with the Borland products they've made free (beer) so far, it makes no sense for them not to make things free. The next logical step is for them to start releasing code to these older products. Something like desqview is special in that if people are using it and relying upon it, there is probably not anything that can really replace it. It's good to see, they aren't losing anything by giving it away now and the next step is the source code. It's part of the promise of opensource, your solutions will never die becuase you'll have to code if you need it; well it's about time that the software industry stepped up to that plate also because the competition is good and I've got hardware sitting around that might be interesting with some of that old software. Also, who's to say that something like WordStar might not have continued had it been opened up, it certainly had the community of users it was a support problem that did it in. Some of that older stuff could get migrated to more modern platforms. It does nobody any good to have something like that die.

Re:Is this that important?

[alangmead]

That isn't quite true. They did have most of the apps that came from the X consortium's base distribution. Also they had what was at their time the neatest X app. One that would intercept all keyboard and screen writing calls of any DOS app and turn them into X events.

This isn't like VNC's remote computing where you get a view of the remote machine's screen. This was turning a program into a X client, each invocation being displayed on any arbitrary machine on the network.

Re:Is this that important?

[garyrich]

-1 wrong....

All the apps bundled with DV/X were X apps. The cool thing that few people understood was its ability to run X clients locally. It had all the standard x apps that were around. ico, xeyes, maze, etc. People ported most everything else (such as Mosaic) and made them available.

Re:Is this that important?

[edesio]

I would love to see Turbo Pascal Version 3 free! This was my first and best pascal development environment. It was really fast and generated very compact code. Remember it run in 64 KBytes!

(showing my age)

Re:A new low

[rtaylor]

Methings U cumplane to mush. I deffently thinc that.

Lighten Up

[hendridm]

Ahh, people type things like "prolly" and "gonna" and "whadda you think". The author was likely aware of his playful choice of words.

Alternative Download

[MiTEG]

DESQview/X 2.1 is available for download from http://www.chsoft.com

Disk 1
Disk 2
Disk 3
Disk 4
Disk 5
Disk 6
Disk 7
Disk 8
FREEdisk

Re:Alternative Download

[Anonymous Coward]

Many thanks to the chsoft people; as an attempt to share the load, the files are also at: ftp://uml-pub.ists.dartmouth.edu/mirrors/desqviewx

Re:Alternative Download

[csbruce]

Yeash, nine ISOs! How did that ever fit on a 640K machine?

Re:Alternative Download

[fredrik70]

You're joking, right?
Well, if you're not, just a little hint - think floppies, not ISOs..

Re:Alternative Download

[ScumBiker]

In order to save a mirror from AC oblivion, here's a copy of the link to a DesqviewX mirror:

ftp://uml-pub.ists.dartmouth.edu/mirrors/desqviewx

totally illiterate

[Anonymous Coward]

It **peaked** his interest? Try piqued.

Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Anonymous Coward]

I was visiting an old abandonware sites, recapping yesterdays gone by when I found something that definitely piqued my interest. It seems Symantec (purchasers of former company Quarterdeck) has released DeskView/X into public domain and it can be downloaded now. DesqView/X was a GUI and OS extender that installed into DOS very much like MS Windows does. This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even gateway serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals. It was way ahead of its time and is a pretty decent toy to play with if you have an old 486 laying around. Anyway, there is a petition being started that is petitioning Symantec to release the source code as OpenSource. I think this is a really good idea and could possibly help a lot of other existing projects; for example, WINE. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[feceus]

"has released DesqView/x into public domain"

Looks like you need an editor too =)

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Anonymous Coward]

..and you know that again next week someone will be questioning the value of a college degree for technical careers. Isn't this proof that you should go though a four year program after high school rather than going directly for the cert and into the workforce?

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's proof that you should go through high-school.

deffently?

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[mabinogi]

If you haven't learnt enough english to spell 'definitely', or when to use 'piqued' not 'peaked', by the time you finish High School, then there really isn't any need to attend University. There's no more that can be done for you.

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus:

and could possibly help lots of other existing projects; for example, WINE. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"

Or maybe:

and could possibly help a lot other existing projects; for example, WINE. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"

Sound better ...

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[legis]

> and could possibly help lots of other existing projects; for example, WINE.

Actually it won't help WINE because you still need a copy of Win 3.1 in order to run Windows apps in DESQview X. Also, it will only run it in real mode.

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Mark Pitman]

I agree. I don't remember professors in college teaching spelling and grammar...

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Anonymous Coward]

getta life

does it really matter that I didn't cap the beg of this sentence? Do you understand the point of this post?

get a hobby, and quit attacking the person - I type e-slang all the time, never capping anything, using words like coulda and woulda, and even some Fox-worthy words like 'ustacould'.

This doesn't mean I'm too stupid to prepare a nice resume!

You guys that are after this guy for his post are prolly the same folk that think that wearing a tie instead of jeans makes you smarter and you'll provide all kinds of shait about "customers" and the "real" business world to back up your claims.

I say that folk useta wear tights and white wiggs...now, suits and ties. fight the man and wear jeans to work! If we all band together, we can change the dress code!! No, business casual doesn't cut the mustard!

save yer flames for, I.can't.do-calulus_but_im- -clean-cut-and-have-a-strong_handshake-and-freely- conform-to-advance.com and not /.

feh

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't mean I'm too stupid to prepare a nice resume!

It does seem to mean that using real words is a serious and uncommon effort for you. I've been wearing t-shirts and jeans to work for several years, but I d'nt us crp7c a88rvs for the same reason I don't drool on my keyboard--I don't want to come across as an idiot.

Re:Some corrections to get the /. editors started

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I don't remember professors in college teaching spelling and grammar...

Then you must be a Polytechnic University grad.

This is ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm. How could this possibly help WINE? Honestly. You say so yourself that it can only run Win 3.1 apps. I remember Desqview myself... Tandy shipped it with 286es if I remember correctly. This is like saying "let's open the source to DOS cause it could help UNIX shell writers. Puh-leeze.

By the way, Windows (NT) doesn't load on top of DOS. Nice try, though.

Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg.

To whoever decided to moderate 10 of my old posts -1 instantly in the span of 2 minutes: you are a loser. Zapping my karma to zilch hasn't ruined my day a bit. Maybe I'll go over to Kuro5hin where people can carry on an intelligent, unbiased conversation.

--cscx

Re:This is ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

That was from Jamie, who gets off on modding down anyone that criticizes his moderation system.

Re:This is ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh dude... the tandy thing was Deskmate... not desqview.

Re:This is ridiculous

[spauldo]

By the way, Windows (NT) doesn't load on top of DOS. Nice try, though.

All versions of windows v3.11 and earlier did. Considering that desqview was in competition with windows 3.x, it makes no sense to compare it to NT.

Hell, back when this was out, NT was called Microsoft OS/2 (yes, _microsoft_). I know, I got the disks for it on my shelf.

Nice try though.

Re:This is ridiculous

[ThatComputerGuy]

Of course, I could be mistaken as well, since I never used Desqview...

But are you mistaking Tandy's DeskMate for Desqview? DeskMate was Tandy's whole desktop environment, the whole yellow-on-blue-by-default thing that let you type/draw/etc. Basically kind of an office suite that ran on a 286, it was pretty cool at the time.

Re:This is ridiculous

[ThatComputerGuy]

Just found a link, in case you've never seen DeskMate, this dude claims it's his favorite gui.

Re:This is ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, moron. NT was never Microsoft OS/2. Microsoft worked with IBM on OS/2 and then screwed IBM and made NT, Which was called Microsoft Windows NT when it was released. It (NT) did (does) have an OS/2 compatibility layer, but was not called OS/2. That's an IBM trademark you twit. SO the disks on your shelves are either Microsoft's branding of OS/2 or Microsoft Windows NT. Nice try though.

Re:This is ridiculous

[starduste]

Umm. How could this possibly help WINE? Honestly. You say so yourself that it can only run Win 3.1 apps. I remember Desqview myself... Tandy shipped it with 286es if I remember correctly. This is like saying "let's open the source to DOS cause it could help UNIX shell writers. Puh-leeze.

It will help the WINE authors precisely because of the reason you stated: it runs Windows 3.1 apps. WINE doesn't run all Windows 3.1 apps - because not all APIs have been completed. Therefore, if the source for Desqview is available, so are the APIs. Including any bugs which programs might rely on. This will help further in figuring out how Microsoft have developed the WIN32 APIs, considering that Win95 if basically an updated Win 3.1.

Re:This is ridiculous

[spauldo]

Well, that seems awful funny since I have the disks right here.

Lesse, what does it say...

Right off the disk:

Microsoft OS/2 Operating System
Installation Disk A
OS/2 Series
Disk format: High-density (1.44MB)
Version 1.3
Disk Assy 096-045-647
©1981-1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

It was part of the LAN Manager suite. I've got the complete disk set of OS/2, but one of my ex-coworkers overwrote one of the lan manager disks so I haven't been able to play with that aspect of it. But OS/2 does install, and looks an awful lot like a stripped down NT 3.5.

Re:This is ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't run Windows 3.1 apps. It runs Windows 3.1 itself in a VDM.

Re:This is ridiculous

[gi-tux]

DeskMate came on all Tandy 1000s after the very first (original T1000). This included 8088, 8086, and 80286 based systems. It was also available for the higher end 80386 systems. But that isn't the only place you could get it. I still have my copy of DeskMate for the Tandy Color Computer running the 6809 (Motorola) chip.
There were actually 2 versions of DeskMate. The first was the blue and yellow version. The next one was truely graphical. The graphical version first came out with the T1000EX. The CoCo version was this one and it was the second machine to have it available. Shortly followed by the 1000SX. Later the 1000HX and 1000TX, 1000TL/2 etc. came with this version.
While I wouldn't say that I liked it that well, it was a tool to get a lot of people started in computing. Windows 3.1 was the first MS Windows to really blow it away completely. And even it didn't have the apps at first that the average user wanted on their desktop.

Slashdotted, obligatory mirrors

[Gothmolly]

http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html

http://www.freemm.org/DesqView X/

http://www.bookcase.com/library/software/msdos.a pp s.desqview-x.html

Re:Slashdotted, obligatory mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory linkifications:

http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html

http://www.freemm.org/DesqViewX/

http://www.bookcase.com/library/software/msdos.app s.desqview-x.html

Old software not always releaseable

[SteveX]

A lot of commercial software uses pieces licensed from other people, and sometimes the people who developed the licensed technology aren't willing to release it.

I know of one scanner company that normally plays nicely (releases specs for the protocols for their SCSI and USB scanners) that cannot release their parallel protocol because of agreements they have with the suppliers of the chipsets in the scanners... Yet the company fields hostile "release the protcol you idiots" spam from "Open Source" advocates.

It's cool when a company can release an old product free - but in some cases it's just not possible...

- Steve

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, many companies use that excuse because they don't want to tell you the truth. Nvidia for example.

Me: I'd like any documentation on how to program your fine chips.
Nvidia: We can't open source our drivers because they contain 3rd party IP that we don't own.

Of course, they didn't answer the question I asked. The real reason they won't release any kind of info (docs or the source to their drivers) is that their plan is to segment the market via driver tweaks. The only major difference between their Quadro line and their Geforce line is the drivers. The Quadro drivers support accelerated anti-alaised lines. The Geforce drivers dont, even though the hardware does.

Since Nvidia wants to be the graphics hardware in all those Linux boxes that are replacing SGIs on animator's desks, they can't risk a bunch of GNU hippies writing drivers that let professionals use Geforce cards as if they were Quadros.

Rule #1 in dealing with businesses. If they have any reason to lie to you, they will. Plan for it.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[VAXman]

The real reason they won't release any kind of info (docs or the source to their drivers) is that their plan is to segment the market via driver tweaks.

And this is a problem for you because ... ?

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it seems to be the ruling mentality that everything should be just handed out for free, there should be no such thing as ownership of ideas, and that people don't really need to be paid for their work, especially if it's a hard to define and intagible work such as software, music, or literature.

Yeah, it's a really big problem, don't you see?

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[tkrotchko]

"there should be no such thing as ownership of ideas,"

There's no law in the world that allows ownership of ideas, but you knew that, right?

When you get a patent, its not on an idea, but on an application of that idea.

For example, you couldn't patent the idea of RADAR, but you can patent an expression of the idea.

That's why you can't patent a mathematical formula. But you can patent something (medicine, car, computer, boat, plane) that takes advantage of that formula.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[Hawke]

Also, for some older software, releasing the binary might BE releasing the source code. If the authors of the program wrote machine language, (not really that much of a stretch) there isn't too much more they could release.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[Mr. Slippery]

When you get a patent, its not on an idea...That's why you can't patent a mathematical formula.

Would that thet were so. Unfortunately, the U.S. patent office believes that algorithms - basic mathematical constructs - are patentable.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[sql*kitten]

Rule #1 in dealing with businesses. If they have any reason to lie to you, they will. Plan for it.

If anyone has a reason, they'll lie to you. It all depends whether their reason is good enough.

I'm guessing that the money that nVidia make off their expensive Quadros will subsidize development that will eventually make it into their cheaper Geforces. This isn't a bad thing; the alternative is that the consumer cards are more expensive and less capable.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[ewieling]

DV/X licensed a lot of 3rd party technology that was incorporated into DV/X. The only tech that I recall is the DOS4GX stuff, but I think some of the networking tech was also licensed, as well as, perhaps, the X Server.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[Anonymous Coward]

As an old assembly language programmer, I don't agree at all. It's difficult to disassemble a binary back into sensible ASM source. The original will have meaningful labels and symbols, hopefully some comments, and maybe even some macros.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[McFly777]

IIRC algorithms used to be unpatentable. This changed when someone proved that a mechanical equivalent to something like an NAND gate could be built and therefore combined to make any digital circuit. Therefore the courts ruled that if an algorithm could be run on a computer, it was possible to create a mechanical device, therefore the algorithm is patentable.

Screwy reasoning to used to screw over one of the better restrictions on patents, but what do you expect from a bunch of lawyers.

p.s. If YOU are a lawyer, I am obviously NOT referring to you personaly; just lawyers in general. ;)

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[Newtonian_p]

Actually, a GeForce card can be converted into a Quadro card by just changing a jumper. Then, all you have to do is install the Quadro drivers and there you go, you got yourself a cheap pro-card with hardware accelerated rendering in 3dsmax.
Go here for instructions:
http://www.geocities.com/tnaw_xtennis/G-Quadro/E-G -Quadro.htm

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[jareds]

IIRC algorithms used to be unpatentable. This changed when someone proved that a mechanical equivalent to something like an NAND gate could be built and therefore combined to make any digital circuit.

True, but if the Patent Office wanted to, it could request a working model <evil grin>. Oh well.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[ab315]

I think it's more likely that any additional profits will go to shareholders.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[Wholeflaffer]

p.s. If YOU are a lawyer, I am obviously NOT referring to you personaly; just lawyers in general. ;)

Spoken like a true disclaimer!

desqview/x

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah! i have orginal boxed version of the desqview/x it was very hard to find it elsewhere , there is none in cleveland oh area and 5 years ago while taking first trip to los angeles and there were alots of used computer stores wow tons of odd and some rare computer hardwares and tillions boxes of softwares and came across the motherlode of desqview/x!!!!
cost? it was 24 bucks for orginal boxed version with thick book ,total weighed like 3 bricks!!!!
as far i know i seen them before at first opening of new microcenter around 90's it was selling new for $225.00 quite pricey those days
and with using it ,it can be a terminal cleint to remote linux x window server esy way :)

DOS 95

[wildcard023]

If you install w95 and then edit the msdos.sys file, you can add

BootGUI=0
Logo=0

and the machine will start up to a command prompt.

You can then go delete all shell(w95) related things.

--
Mike
We here at the illuminati don't use DOS.

Re:DOS 95

[Craig Davison]

Don't forget to put dos=noauto in your config.sys. This stops Windows from auto-loading ifshlp.sys, setver.exe and various other clutter.

Re:DOS 95

[13Echo]

Wouldn't it be easier to just format a floppy disk as a system disk. Copy format, edit, fdisk, and any other essientials to the floppy. Boot the floppy on the 486 and then patition and format the hard drive? Then copy the other programs over to the hard drive?

Nope

[markb]

The article doesn't say the source code was released. I assume just the binaries were released into the public domain, and the source code remains secret.

desqview learned me to do proper programming

[MavEtJu]

Desqview learned me to do proper programming. It's true. When I used it the first time, all my self-written C programs (and pascal too) bombed because of uninitialized pointer references.

I had to walk through everything to fix it and it learned me how to threat pointers properly. A lesson learned which will never be forgotten :-)

Re:desqview learned me to do proper programming

[nvrrobx]

We also learned how to properly give up timeslices thanks to DESQview :)

Re:A new low

[siegesama]

Don't forget "peaked".

I think he meant "piqued"

DR-DOS

[hendridm]

OpenDOS/DR-DOS is another free, open source alternative. eBay has MS-DOS for sale too.

Re:DR-DOS

[Kaiwen]

DR-DOS is not open source. It is freely downloadable for personal use (if you can find the link; it's been buried, and Lineo isn't too interested in giving out the info; but it's there). But the source is not available, and Lineo retains all rights to the product.

Re:DR-DOS

[Newtonian_p]

It may not be open source (as in free software) but you can buy the source if you want it:
The source code for DR-DOS is available, and may be purchased by contacting a member of the Lineo Sales Team (Lineo Sales Contact Form).

from: http://www.drdos.com/index.html

Okay...

[mindstrm]

It would be really nice to see something that can display windows apps remotely via X (and via something more efficient than VNC).

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tarantella... more or less :)

Re:A new low

[rtaylor]

If the english language made any damn sense it wouldn't be so hard. Anyone can learn english in 6 months. Problem is it takes another 20 years to memorize all the exceptions to rules.

I willn't stand for it ;)

Re:A new low

[Anonymous Coward]

A few minutes after the article was posted, the first couple of sentences were removed from it.

This wouldn't help WINE

[RevAaron]

I used to use DV and DV/X through through the eras of DOS, Win 3.1 and Win95. All of my apps were DOS-based, but I still wanted to multitask. That, and DV was able to do something very important for me as a BBSer that Win 3.1 couldn't- have a ZModem download in ProComm+ going in the background while actually *doing* something else.So, yes, I have some experience.

In any case, the release of DV/X wouldn't help WINE in any way, really. DV DV/X allowed you to run Win 3.1 apps in the same way that you can run Classic Mac OS apps in Mac OS X, or that OS/2 2.1 could run Win 3.1 apps. Win 3.1 ran in a little box all to itself. It ran the entire Win 3.1 OE, not implemented the API (as Wine and Odin do). You can see a screenshot of this here.

DV/X was pretty cool, esp. for a DOS user in those days, but it isn't really relevant anymore. I could see people with old DOS machines who wanted the binaries, that makes perfect sense. However, there's really nothing to be gained from the release of the source. It's not like someone can port it to MS-DOS/PowerPC. ;)

Re:This wouldn't help WINE

[RevAaron]

One cool thing about DV/X I forgot to mention was that it could export this Win 3.1 window as an X application, so you could run Win 3.1 and its apps remotely. Never used that functuality, having only a single computer with a single modem, but it seemed cool. Again, there are plenty of Windows products that do this now (with current Win32 apps), as well as WINE. Hell, you could achieve the same with running Bochs or VMWare running Win 3.1 remotely.

Re:This wouldn't help WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you run Windows in 386 mode? I notice in the screenshot it's running in standard mode. (286? my memory fades)

Re:This wouldn't help WINE

[RevAaron]

I can't recall. It's been too long. I wouldn't be surprised if it were running in Standard (8086) mode rather than Enhanced (386), I think that was an easy way to sandbox the environment. But I'm not positive, I only gave that functionality a try, but didn't need/want to run any Win 3.1 apps. I'm still confused about how people suffered through Win 3.1 when they could've run GEOS or Mac OS, both of which, in my experience, were a helluva lot more robust and user friendly (both being relative terms).

Re:This wouldn't help WINE

[innocent_white_lamb]

Could you run Windows in 386 mode?

I'm fairly sure that this was a limitation of DESQview; Windows would run only in standard mode as DESQview used the "advanced" functionality of the 386/486 to separate its own tasks and could not share that ability with Windows. Therefore, standard mode only.

As I recall, anyway.

Re:This wouldn't help WINE

[Bert64]

From my experience, the so-called "386 enhanced" mode of windows 3.1, actually resulted in vastly reduced performance compared to the standard mode.

Re:This wouldn't help WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

True it was slower. But many latter applications (Office 4.2? WordPerfect 6?) required it. This thing might have very limited utility if it only runs standard mode Windows.

Re:A new low

[bmoyles]

$submission_text =~ s/$/[sic]/g;
:)

Any Screenshots?

[kawaichan]

I haven't used this before, anyone have more information with screenshots?

[ot] TightVNC

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're hating VNC because of its bandwidth usage, check out TightVNC. It's basically a fork of VNC that merges in Tight Encoding (which I don't know much about, but which uses far less bandwidth than normal VNC) and a bunch of other nifty features. Of course, since it's a fork of VNC, you can rest assured it's under the GPL.

Nifty features it includes:

• Zlib compression
• JPEG compression where appropriate
• automatic ssh tunneling on Un*x
• Better handling of cursor updates
• others...

It's much more usable over a modem(!), for sure.

Re:[ot] TightVNC

[mindstrm]

Yes. Still not the same thing.
I want something that does like RDP to X translation.

VNC or TightVNC are still just screenscrapers/window scrapers

Re:[ot] TightVNC

[DemianJ]

http://www.rdesktop.org Is that what you are looking for?

Re:[ot] TightVNC

[GoRK]

RDPX is easy enough. (see rdesktop) but that won't get you what you're looking for since (afaik) there is nothing for windows to serve single apps out of RDP. Plus RDP doesn't really have the features to transparently support a desktop like this.

The closest I have seen is running the Citrix ICA client in X and exporting a single application from the server. It can be made to have the application windows borderless and managed by your window manager. Some apps need to be run in a desktop window though, since they try to do things like customize the tilebar and control menus, install an item in the tray, etc.

~GoRK

X workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

"This little GUI can run X-Windows"

I hope it is still supported by Symantec, so I could convince my boss to throw Windows out of our boxes that we use as X workstations (with Exceed) and replace it by DesqView!

NO PLEASE! Just kidding!

Re:Some corrections...quibble on Pete!

[martin-boundary]

Isn't it "Pete's sake" rather than "Pete sakes"? Where does that
saying come from, anyway?

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN: OBSCENITY

[dhogaza]

I didn't call him a clueless idiot. I said *he* shouldn't assume the person posting this is a clueless idiot.

Can't you ead renglish?

Pazuzues should have written...

[1010011010]

Pazuzues should have written "I found something that you could say piqued my interest. It seems that Symantec (which purchased now-defunct Quarterdeck years ago) has released into the public domain binary versions of DesqView/X. DesqView/X was a GUI and DOS extender that installed over DOS very much like MS Windows did. This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even act as gateway to serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals. It was way ahead of its time and is still a pretty decent toy to play with. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16MB of RAM, for Pete's sake! All it needs is an old 486. A petition has been started to urge Symantec to release the source code under an Open Source license. I think this is a really good idea, as it could possibly help a number of projects, such as WINE. DesqView/X is available for download now."

How much "editing" does being an "editor" involve, anyway? 8^D

Re:Pazuzues should have written...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez, no kidding. "peaked my interest" might be a fun pun if it was a pr0n article..

Re:Pazuzues should have written...

[ThatComputerGuy]

You obviously don't read /. much anymore...

Re:Pazuzues should have written...

[Anonymous Coward]

> How much "editing" does being an "editor" involve, anyway?

Hmm... seems to be a common problem in the computer biz. The general standard of written english is terrible and any attempt to persuade people to improve is met by wails of protest about how communication is what is important and not good english grammar and spelling.

Needless to say, I'm not exactly in agreement with this philosophy!

English is to Perl as...

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

__________ is to ____________ Fill in the blanks with Your Native Language and Your Favorite Programming Language. English is a rich language (that has borrowed/stolen from many others) and you can say a lot with it. It doesn't necessarily have to be consistent or easy. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

Offtopic Nostalgia..

[AnalogBoy]

Thanks, pazuzes. Now i'm going to have to have a flashback. **sits back**

1994.. Running my BBS locally.. Wanted to multitask... installed Desqview.. wow.. leet! Its like dosshell.. Only.. not! Oh, crap.. LORD is running slow on node 2.. time to tweak QEMM.. lets see if we can get that extra 2K out!

1995.. OS/2 warp comes along. I install it - that extra ~100K on top of 640 is LEET!!! I never go back.

I have to wonder.. How fast would Windows 3.1, DOS, or OS/2 boot on a 1.4 Ghz Athlon? :)

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[Junta]

Speaking as someone who still occasionally runs DOS/Win3.11 on a 400 MHz machine... damn fast. On My 400 MHz machine, win311/DOS starts up in a negligible amount of time, really cool to do so too..

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[BlueGecko]

Where can you still buy Win 3.11? I'm assuming it must be available somewhere for a reasonable price.

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[LordNimon]

OS/2 boots in about 20 seconds on a 1.2GHz athlon.

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[Mike Monett]

>I have to wonder.. How fast would Windows 3.1, DOS, or OS/2 boot on a 1.4 Ghz Athlon? :)

I'm one of the diehards who stuck with DOS and Win 3.x. I wrote my own file management software based on locating files quickly, then calling editors or viewers as needed. It is exactly the opposite of Windows, where you select a program, then try to find the file you want to work with.

Each file has a comment attached that stays with the file when I copy or move it to a different directory. The software automatically searches in the filename, then the comment info when searching in a directory. This makes finding a file very fast.

It runs on top of DOS, and calls DOS or Windows programs as needed. I estimate it improves my productivity by 10 to 100 times over GUI-based software. It is ideal for finding files in directories that may have 5 or 10 thousand files - try scrolling through the tiny file viewer in Windows to locate an individual file. It's next to impossible to get the right one.

I cringe whenever I see anyone trying to find a file in Windows or Linux. The amount of time wasted is horrible.

I never have problems with viruses - they won't run on Win 3.x.

And I dont' have to reformat my hard disk and reinstall Windows every three months like everyone else I know who runs the later versions of Windows.

DOS 5.01 boots in less than one second on a K6-450.

WFWG 3.11 boots in less than four seconds if you don't have too many program icons loaded on the desktop.

I plan to upgrade to a 1.4GHz soon. I expect the boot times will be a tad faster :)

Mike Monett
mrmonett@yahoo.com

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[Mike Monett]

>Where can you still buy Win 3.11? I'm assuming it must be available somewhere for a reasonable price.

It used to be available on the net. I downloaded it as a backup for when my floppies die.

Probably the best place is a scrap 486 or P100 machine that someone wants to throw away. It will probably have a bunch of graphics editors like Corel, PSPro, and other stuff already installed.

You can use LapLink to copy the files to your hard disk. I have succeeded in being able to move programs to any directory by simple editing. Sometimes you need a binary editor to change hard-coded directories in the exe's. The only one I could not move this way was was Excel 5.0

I run Opera 3.62, Netscape 2.02, and MS Explorer 3.0 and 5.0. If I cannot view a site in Opera or Netscape, I try IE 3.0, then the humongous bloatware 5.0 version. If it cannot view the site, I go somewhere else.

There used to be a lot of legacy Win 3.x code on the web, but it is rapidly dying off. TuCows and some of the other shareware sites still have a few.

You cannot run all the latest bells and whistles crap, but I see very little need to do so.

As I mentioned in another post, I wrote my own file management software that is about 10 to 100 times faster than GUI-based programs. Using Flat Real Mode, I can access all xms memory for my own code. See

http://mr_monett.tripod.com/frm.htm

I plan to get a machine for Linux soon, but the only reason is to run the Eagle pcb layout software. I'm very happy to stay with DOS and Win 3.x, and continually extend the capabilities of my own stuff. One day I won't need Windows for anything :)

Regards,

Mike Monett

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[s390]

I have to wonder.. How fast would Windows 3.1, DOS, or OS/2 boot on a 1.4 Ghz Athlon? :)

I have an OS/2 4.1 FixPak 15 partition on a 1.4 Ghz Athlon. It's useful for Win3.1 Office apps, plays MP3s well; I haven't tried VoiceType but the Athlon is fast enough.

To answer your question, it boots pretty quickly but not blazingly fast because most of the boot activity is I/O bound.

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd never thought I'd live long enough to hear a DOS user bragging about how his platform is free of viruses :)

Re:Offtopic Nostalgia..

[Bert64]

If you will read the crap displayed when you install XP, it will tell you that XP loads faster than *ANY* previous release of windows. Isn`t this false advertising? win3.11 loads almost instantly on a 400mhz machine

Re:A new low

[xah]

I found something that you could say peaked my interest.

The word is "piqued," although here it is used improperly. From M-W, it means "to excite or arouse by a provocation, challenge, or rebuff."

It seems Symantec (purchasers of former company Quarterdeck) has release DeskView/X into public domain and can be downloaded now.

It's "DesqView/X." It's "released." It's "the public domain." It's a run-on sentence.

DesqView/X was a GUI and OS extender that installed into DOS very much like MS Windows does.

Here we have an inconsistent use of tense. The last word should be "did." I wonder what "installed into DOS" could mean.

This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even gateway serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals.

It's either "X" or "X Window System." We have another run-on sentence. I wonder what "gateway serve" is. DesqView/X was both an X client and an X server, I believe. Of course, the X Client is what would run on the DesqView/X machine to be displayed on a remote X Server.

It was way ahead of its time and is a pretty decent toy to play with if you have a old 486 laying around.

Insert a comma after "time." It's "an old 486."

Anyways there is a petition being started that is petitioning Symantec to release the source code as OpenSource.

It's "open source."

I think this is a really good idea and could possiably help alot of other existing projects like WINE for example.

It's "possibly." It's "a lot." Insert a comma after WINE.

It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!

It's usually stated as "for Pete's sake," referring to Saint Peter.

How utterly abominable. What a disservice Slashdot does its readers, acting as its readers were unintelligent, and uncaring about either spelling or grammar. What a disservice Slashdot does to the English language.

"Picqued", not "peaked"

[easter1916]

Does anyone at Slashdot have a dictionary and a thesaurus?

Re:"Picqued", not "peaked"

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you could use one yourself, because there is no "c" in piqued. The first rule in spelling flames is:

1. Don't have misspellings in your spelling flame.

That is all

~~~

Re:"Picqued", not "peaked"

[easter1916]

Fair enough. But shouldn't there be a period after "That is all"?

Re:"Picqued", not "peaked"

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. Touché.

~~~

Re:"Picqued", not "peaked"

[innocent_white_lamb]

On the subject of obsolete but wonderful software, does anyone else remember Borland's Turbo Lightning?

A TSR dictionary and thesaurus that would integrate into any text application. Just type along and it would automatically highlight any word that it considered mis-spelled. Sit the cursor on a word and hit a function-key combination and get a list of synonyms. Handy as all hell.

I used it with my Fidonet message editor for many years, until I updated my DOS version and it broke.

Re:"Picqued", not "peaked"

[Anonymous Coward]

But then what'd happen to "Here, here!", "per say" and "hobbiest"?...

I loved desqview.

[Restil]

I used the text version of desqview. I tried desqview/X at the time, but the 386-25 with 3 megs of ram I had wasn't quite up to using it usefully.

I'm not POSITIVE about desqview/X's support of windows apps. If I remember correctly, it could export certain apps, but not those running in enhanced mode. Of course, I'm speaking about stuff I was playing with 10 years ago.

And as far as WiNE is concerned, they've pretty well gotten the 3.x API solid, and have for several years now.

-Restil

Re:I loved desqview.

[Pazuzues]

I'm not saying WINE doesn't have solid code but another interpretation is always a good thing. Especially when you consider Quaterdeck's highest priority was code optimization so it will fit and run on a 386. Cross referencing source never killed anybody. If anything WINE might be able to learn from past mistakes. It has the potential to be educational.
Studying artifact code can teach alot.

Re:I loved desqview.

[juuri]

Wasn't quite up to using it? Perhaps time has confused your memory.

DesqView/X would not have run on that machine, period. IIRC it would only run with a minimum of 12M ram and that was with trickery to fool it into believing there was 16M of ram.

Re:I loved desqview.

[TheCrazyFinn]

I've got it running on my old PS/2 Model 70 386 with 4Mb RAM and a 160Mb ESDI HDD. it'll run, but it craps out constantly (Probably doesn't like MCA)

Never thought I'd do anything with my fav. monitor stand though, now if I can find a use for those 2 dual serial cards sitting in it...

The Crazy Finn

Re:I loved desqview.

[Anonymous Coward]

I works great on my 4mb of ram box... It's just as responsive as my Athlon with 1/2 gig of ram is running modern applications.

Lucky Pete...

[Gingko]

"It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"

Great, now all I need to do is change my name by deed poll... software usability at its best :)

Henry

dv/x

[fea]

I used it for quite a while until I started using Linux (1994). Best multi-tasker on a PC prior to Linux. It did display Win3.1 and X both. I don't think I ever used W95 with it. There may be some code secrets in there that could help WINE, but I would not be one to say.

Re:More info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flaimbait! Don't you know a troll when you see one? You have the moderating intellegence of Jon Katz!

Re:Some corrections...quibble on Pete!

[Darth Maul]

The saying refers to Peter, the apostle of Christ. As in Saint Peter, or "for Saint Peter's sake".

Re: Desqview

[innocent_white_lamb]

Remember DoubleDOS? I used that on my XT to multitask my BBS (Opus) and MsgED in a separate window so I could read Fidonet messages while folks were online.

Later on I used DESQview on my 386 and 486 to do the same thing, but by then I was running two phone lines and two modems, so I had three tasks running then (two BBS's and my message reader).

Re:Some corrections...quibble on Pete!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's slightly blasphemous.

The apostle Peter.

Re: Desqview

[MindStalker]

RIP graphics? OH GOD THE AGONY! THE PAIN!
(ok it was a neat idea, but I never saw anyone make good use of it)

A low memory X server

[Chris Colohan]

It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!

So can XFree86. At least, the version I was using back in 1992 certainly worked on a 486 with 4MB of RAM. Slow, but functional.

Re:A low memory X server

[dead_penguin]

4 megs was (is!) a little tight to do anything meaningful with XFree86. I remember playing around on a box with 4 megs in 1995 and it just being too slow and hitting swap almost non-stop. After upgrading to a whopping 8 megs, though, a threshold was reached and I was able to have a fairly useful (and responsive) desktop on that old 486-33.

I'm sure current versions of XFree86 would run about the same given that old hardware.

not peaked

[Anonymous Coward]

"peaked my interest"

You mean PIQUED. Illiterate.

Sniff sniff

[jbuhler]

Ah, for the good old days circa 1991, when 4 megs of RAM was a bunch and DesqView was the method of choice for multitasking on your PC. I fondly recall running my BBS in one DV window while writing term papers in another with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

Quaint things I remember about DV:

* Well-behaved BBS programs (including all the FidoNet tools) were DV-aware and would kindly give up its timeslice if they weren't doing anything.

* QEMM, the memory manager that came with DesqView, had a complicated "optimization" script that tried to rearrange all your TSR programs to maximize the amount of available memory under 640k. The size of each Desqview DOS session was limited to the amount of sub-640k RAM that was free when you started DV, so optimization was really important.

* You started different programs from the DV menu by assigning them two-letter key codes. I remember rearranging the codes at length to minimize the finger travel time needed to open my most frequently used programs.

* DV was really bad at switching video modes. If you happened to be running Windows under DV, the screen would turn to some kind of bizarre CGA/EGA mode when you invoked the DV menu.

DV/X was going to be the "next big thing," but I don't recall hearing about it after the feature article in HAL-PC magazine. In any case, it was quite expensive. Even QEMM was something like $40; I recall getting a copy as a birthday present, which became the only properly licensed piece of commercial software on my machine at the time.

Oh well, better mod this one (-1, maudlin nostalgia).

Re:Sniff sniff

[Anonymous Coward]

* DV was really bad at switching video modes. If you happened to be running Windows under DV, the screen would turn to some kind of bizarre CGA/EGA mode when you invoked the DV menu.

No, it was bad at handling colormaps. As I recall, DESQView used a 4 bit colormap (could it handle more? I can't remember), or 16 colors, and so did Windows while in 640x480 on a VGA adapter; not many of us had SVGA cards back then. Having two 4 bit colormaps on the same screen just doesn't work out too great.

Re:Sniff sniff

[elbobo]

* Well-behaved BBS programs (including all the FidoNet tools) were DV-aware and would kindly give up its timeslice if they weren't doing anything.

and there was some little tool out there that would do the same thing for unfriendly apps. i clearly remember the excitement of getting that one going, and having all my apps speed up. anyone remember what that was called? maybe it was just called timeslice..

Re:Good Day, Gentlemen

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by "who pays more?" I have to buy Microsoft's licenses and AOL's net connexion.

Ok, own up -- who used it?

[JoshMKiV]

Who used it to run 9 nodes of PC Express? Come on, someone out there did...

Re:Ok, own up -- who used it?

[innocent_white_lamb]

I ran two Fidonet nodes on Opus using it. Does that count?

Public domain?

[maxxon]

If it's released into the public domain, what does it matter if it's rereleased as open source?

Re:Public domain?

[Phosphor3k]

Public domain in this case = free binaries. Open source would = free code, ie people could tweak it and compile it for themselves.

Re:Public domain?

[maxxon]

Sounds like there's a terminology error here. "Public domain" means absolutely all copyrights are waived and anything at all can be done with the material. If they're trying to keep the material closed source, then releasing the binaries in the public domain is a seriously self-defeating move -- anyone can do anything with them now, including claiming them as their own, disassembling them and releasing the source, etc.

Re:Public domain?

[Phosphor3k]

Just because copyrights are waived does not mean that they will release the source code.

Desqview was small too.

[jellomizer]

The best part of it was the version of Deskview was that the install disk fit on a sigal floppy. You dont see that anymore

So much for setting up that DV/X webserver

[Eristone]

That'd be a slashdot victim really quick. There was something to running Pine, a DOS Window, RN and WordPerfect all on the same machine. And cutting/pasting between the windows.

How fast?..

[edsel]

Possibly too fast, depending on the applications you want to run.

Last year I was assigned a seemingly trivial "upgrade" project for a customer that runs an old DOS-based app. First of all, I had to find a new PC with an ISA slot -- not as easy as you might think, considering hat the customer wanted a "name-brand" PC with full warranty.

I finally found an HP model with a riser card for ISA support. PC-DOS loaded fine, but when I tried to start the customer's application, the machine locked up tight. After checking with the application vendor, I was chagrined to hear that the program will not run on anything faster than a Pentium 90.

Many DOS-based programs that ran on the ragged edge of (then-current) technology used hard-coded timing loops that simply can't cope with the clock speeds of today's processors.

So maybe DOS will boot super-fast on your Athlon, but there's no guaranty that it wil run many of your "vintage" programs...

Re:How fast?..

[sconeu]

I was chagrined to hear that the program will not run on anything faster than a Pentium 90.

Reminds me of my old SCO usage days. Note: I happened to *LIKE* SCO. But ODT2 crapped out whenever we tried to install it on an 486DX/2-66 with an AHA1542 controller. After we called SCO tech support, and they told us the machine was too fast, we were ROFL for about 5 minutes, since back then (1992), it was well known that when it came to Unix, there was no such thing as too much speed, RAM, or disk space...

Apparently there was a timing loop in the 1542 driver.

Re:How fast?..

[mfos.org]

They make programs that run as a wrapper over the old program, slowing it down. They are used an awful lot in playing old games (Ultima Rockz!). Or DOSEMU might be the answer.

Re:How fast?..

[SpacePunk]

I have this problem with software for sending and receiving programs from CNC(sp)s. The software uses a timing loop for serial i/o instead of relying on hardware timers, and literally talk too fast over serial on anything higher than a 486 for the cnc's to read. (and no, I'm not an industrial technologist so I'm doubly screwed)

-

Re:How fast?..

[msobkow]

I had similar problems with SCO's QIC02 tape drivers back in 1988. Worked fine on the 286 boxen, but on the 386/25 "server" you could not produce a readable tape. Spent many days with their tech support before they got us a patch that would work, then found that it would only work if nothing else was running on the box.

Who says they were the "good" old days? I just seem to recall spending a lot of time debugging tweaky problems that had nothing to do with getting the actual work done!

Re:How fast?..

[innocent_white_lamb]

There are DOS TSR applicatons that do nothing other than eat processor cycles to slow a machine down. The original purpose was to enable people to play XT games with hard-coded timing loops on their brand new 286's. I suspect that you could use one of those to slow a newer machine down too; you would just have to give it loads of the processor time to waste.

Re:How fast?..

[ImaLamer]

I know it defeats the whole purpose... but there are 'cpu-killer' apps that slow down your PC to work with those applications.

Of course if one wants to see how fast DOS will boot on their Athlon... make a *indows Boot Disk. Just make sure you remove the references to win.com, and you'll be alright. Should be in 'DOS' as soon as the BIOS is done.

It's pretty fast.

I've got a question though... what about OS/2. I've got some disks laying around from a place I used to work.

Re:How fast?..

[frozenray]

Who says they were the "good" old days? I just seem to recall spending a lot of time debugging tweaky problems that had nothing to do with getting the actual work done!

Things haven't really changed much since the "good" old days, have they?

Raymond

Re:How fast?..

[orj]

This bug might the result of a flaw in Turbo Pascal's Runtime Lib. Lots of DOS apps were written in TP and they bail with a "Runtime Error 200" or something on Pentium 90's and up.

The problem is a flaw in the "delay" procedure. It overflows it's counter trying to calibrate 1 second in CPU ticks.

Using "slowmo" type utils can fix it. I think Borland also released a patch to TP's runtime lib source. But if you don't have the source to the app you're out of luck there.

Re:How fast?..

[Anonymous Coward]

There are tools about which can patch the executables

http://www.brain.uni-freiburg.de/~klaus/pascal/r un err200/

You can get the patches/updated links from there

Re:How fast?..

[soda]

There is a nice page that has several fixes for this problem - http://www.brain.uni-freiburg.de/~klaus/pascal/run err200/download.html - so you may not be out of ALL luck. ;) I've used the tppatch-program on several applications

Re: Desqview

[jelle]

What a foresight they must have had when they thought of the name, eh?

GREAT multitasking in 640k

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran an older version of desqview - wouldn't run windows, but on an XT clone that ran at 4.77mhz, in 640k, I was able to multitask and it was great! First I tried DoubleDos, and it worked nicely too, but desqview actually had a handful of programs written for it that were "desqview" aware, like Telix, one of the -=great=- old term programs.

Apps that wrote directly to the screen wouldn't multitask properly because they wanted total control of the screen; some programs had "the bios access way" options, but this was HORRIBLY slow on that crate...but some, like Telix, were aware, and shared the screen, so to speak..the result was a bit slower than direct, but much much faster than the alternative.

I even had a utility for desqview that you could load into the dos boxes that would basically put a halt to useles single-user keyboard polling within that window, thereby speeding the whole system up quite a bit...

It was mousable, you could define keyboard shortcuts - it really was the single jack-of-all-trades utility that made computing on that crate bearable...

I also remember cut and paste between apps - in dos, this was great - it even had a 'smart' cut and paste, which was the fore-runner of cut and paste as i know it today...

Ahh, the memories!! logging on to a bbs at 2400 baud, allocating 300k or so to Telix(only the scroll back-buffer was sacrificed), with a dos box open for file management, and a game in a third window - the version I used couldn't truely multitask graphical apps, the games i tried would pause while not active and only run full screen.

It did pre-emtive multitasking to boot! It was WAY ahead of it's time - too bad it got killed along with lots of other promising software lines back in the day...I could launch an app, then launch another app before the first was finished loading! It 'felt' smoother than Windoze 3.1 on a 486 at times!!

Nothing was better than being able to USE my computer while my modem was filling those 360k
5 1/4 disks...

Re:GREAT multitasking in 640k

[innocent_white_lamb]

Apps that wrote directly to the screen wouldn't multitask properly because they wanted total control of the screen;

The application would multitask; they just overwrote whatever else was on the screen so you couldn't hide them in the background or move the window. That sort of thing ran fine, though, if needed.

I even had a utility for desqview that you could load into the dos boxes that would basically put a halt to useles single-user keyboard polling within that window,
Tame.

There was an DOS call that you could use if your program was in a "do-nothing loop" and that IRQ would free the timeslice for either DESQview or Windows, or just do nothing at all if you were running in native DOS. Many input subroutines for BASIC and such incorporated that DOS call. Tame did the same thing for "non-DV-aware" applications, forcing them to give up unneeded timeslices.

...

[rice_burners_suck]

xxxxxxxxxx O xxxxxxxxxx H xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx W xxxxxxxxxx E xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx.

Here is my petition to Symantec.

xxxxxxxxxx O xxxxxxxxxx H xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx W xxxxxxxxxx E xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx.

I applaud and commend you fine folks at Symantec for allowing the free download of DesqView/X. When this software was new, it was far ahead of its time. I believe it contains technology that much new software would do well to have. In that light, I'm asking you to consider releasing the source code to DesqView/X, so that software such as Linux might benefit from its innovative features.

xxxxxxxxxx O xxxxxxxxxx H xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx W xxxxxxxxxx E xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx.

It probably won't happen though.

xxxxxxxxxx O xxxxxxxxxx H xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx W xxxxxxxxxx E xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx L xxxxxxxxxx.

Re:...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's this? Another childish "gimme gimme" demand from someone who, based on his nickname, also wouldn't know a real car if it repeatedly ran over his chest?

It could only happen on Slashdot. I can't wait until you pillowbiters grow up and try this endlessly irritating and phoney "benefit free software" angle in the real world. If nothing else, you'll be good for a laugh.

Re:...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really THAT dense that you don't see what else is on that post? Take another look, pull your head out of your rear, and read their post a bit closer. There is more to it than meets the eye and looks to be one massive piece of sarcasm. Grow up or do us all a favor and leave.

Who own Desqview 1.0 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who own Desqview 1.0 ?

Does it come with a spell checker?

[Webmoth]

Now what would really be cool is a web browser that autormatically corrects spelling errors on Slashdot. :-P

Re:Does it come with a spell checker?

[Knobby]

An automatic speling an grammar checking filter each on downloaded page would be pretty slick.. Work on this for us you will?

I asked them about five years ago to do this...

[Slartibartfast]

It's nice to see that it's happened. However, if you read the glossies (I actually have 'em 'round here somewhere), you'll see that "running Windows" stuff is a bit of an exaggeration. It runs Windows stuff... Windows 3.x stuff, to be precise. I'd say that the potential for Desqview/X would be a lot closer to if Sun released WABI than something that could help the good WINE folk.

Alas.

But, hey -- maybe there is some good stuff to mine. It certainly was an amazing application when it came out; hopefully it will be released as OS, and maybe we can do something unexpected with it.

The Olden Days.

[PhotoGuy]

I used DV/X in the olden days. It was most impressive. It really had better multi-tasking that Windows 3.1 of the day. I had great hopes for it, and I think with better positioning, it could have given Windows a run for the money. It was well targeted upon it's first release, and could have made a difference, but they just didn't follow through. And as they languished, it just became less and less relevant. Still a very cool way of turning an old 486 into a X terminal (and client). Would probably be more efficient than (Linux|FreeBSD)+X.

There's quite a list of things in my book that really could have "made a difference" in the industry, but just didn't follow through effectively. Microsoft may be slow to respond in a lot of cases, but they *do* respond; other folks take years, or never do anything. For fun, here's my list (off the top of my head): Corel Linux, Corel Office, Star Office, BeOS, QNX (lower the damn license fees, okay? :-), SunRays, most thin Clients, Linux PDA's. I'm sure there's a dozen more (and I'm sure they're all sitting in my basement, colecting dust :-)

Here's hoping we'll see more companies whose management can realize when they have a product that can make a difference, and they redirect resources accordingly, rather than thoroughly botching it.

-me

Project Faustus Update

[BankofAmerica_ATM]

Hello to my human associates at Slashdot. Thanks to your continued support, the attack on Project Faustus seems to be nearing its final stages. Please check my journal for more information. Also, please enjoy this interesting story about Japanese culture.

Salutations, BankofAmerica_ATM

Tandy Deskmate

[Anonymous Coward]

Who remembers the _original_ Deskmate, the version that ran in textmode, with an unusual vertical-filepicker interface? (Each application in the suite had a seperate column on the main menu, listing available documents/data files for each program...)

Combine that with a goofy non-Hayes-compatible Tandy 300 baud modem, and you've got hours of fun with the confusing terminal app, on your brand new 1000SX!

Re:Tandy Deskmate

[johnnnyboy]

I had the tandy 1000sl.
It had deskmate too. Remember that dinky hangman game? boy this brings back memories!

I remember spending countless nights playing barren realms, trade wars, globalwar, etc...

My next computer was a pentium 100 mhz. Can you image how hard it was for me to get used to win95?!

Re:A new low

[jeffehobbs]

amen, brother -- what the fuck do slashdot editors *do*, anyway?

~jeff

Desqview cutting and pasting

[MobyTurbo]

Ah, I also have fond memories of running a BBS under Desqview-386. The non-/X version, I only had a 386 with 4 megs of RAM. It multitasked DOS so well when properly tuned that I used one meg for a diskcache with Hyperdisk to provide staged writes (Microsoft's "Smartdisk" was anything but) with enough room to spare to run three or four additional programs. One window for a mail reader, one for the 24 hour BBS, and one or two for additional programs plus infinite tiny DOS shell windows for command line jobs. Not only that, I had Linux 0.95 (later 0.99) set up for dual-boot on it's own 20 meg partition. :-)

Anyhow, turning nostalgia mode off, Linux Window managers could learn from Desqview's sophisticated cut and paste proceedures. It was possible to smoothly paste from, for example, a word processor to cells of a spread-sheet because you could specify keystrokes to go between each piece of data. If the cutting and pasting didn't require any special keys, just press return or space bar to make each line delimited by them. It was simple or powerful, depending upon your needs. KDE (and GNOME, etc.) rock, but they could learn a thing or two about clipboard management from humble Desqview.

Re:Desqview cutting and pasting

[DerekLyons]

KDE (and GNOME, etc.) rock, but they could learn a thing or two about clipboard management from humble Desqview.

Oh, I know that for certain! I'd love to sit some email and newsreader programmers down with a copy of MegaMail or sLmr...

Re:Desqview cutting and pasting

[snake_dad]

Linux Window managers could learn from Desqview's sophisticated cut and paste proceedures.

Oh yeah... that clipboard thing was great. I remember using it to convert simple application-bound databases (e.g. Fidomail-tossers, for those who remember that time :-). Open both programs in a DV window, go to first record in first program, create a macro that creates a record in second program,and subsequently copies and pastes each field across DV sessions.

This may seem cumbersome, but it was a hell of a lot faster/easier then figuring out the proprietory fileformats and writing a C program to do it. For some it may even be a tip for simple one-time only conversions for more recent software.

DESQview/X is in Assembly

[ChipX86]

My uncle, Gary Pope, was co-founder of Quarterdeck, and did development on all versions of QEMM and DESQview. Unfortunately, he does not have the sourcecode to DESQview anymore, as he gave up all rights to it when he retired. However, he has been able to share with me some of the internals of DESQview and DESQview/X. I won't get into much of them, but to all the people who are hoping to get some useful code they can copy and paste into their own programs by signing the petition, you may be disappointed.

The sourcecode to DESQview/X is (at least for the most part) in Assembly. It was the only way they could create a full X environment that could fit on a couple floppies and take so little RAM. I know previous versions used a language that Gary Pope wrote called SYMPL, which was lisp-based and provided the back-end functionality for the multitasking on 8088 processors in the original DESQ and DESQview.

So, most of the code, if it is ever released, may not be completely usable to most people. It would still be an interesting read, however, and I signed the petition almost a year ago.

Another good source of information on DESQview is the newsgroup comp.os.msdos.desqview. It seems to be pretty active, and has some good information on using DESQview.

DESQview and DESQview/X were great products. Have fun :)

Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly

[ChipX86]

Oh, and to all the people who think that DESQview/X could be useful in WINE... DESQview/X never ran Windows programs. It could run Windows 3.0 or lower (or Windows 3.1 in real mode) inside a DESQview/X window, much like DESQview could. It also, I believe, had a display driver for Windows to allow Windows apps to run across the network in a DESQview/X window. However, no emulation ever took place.

Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 3.1 in real mode

It had to be Standard mode. Windows 3.1 completely dumped Real mode support.

Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly

[Brian Feldman]

Doesn't that effectively mean that they _did_ release the source code to it? Run a disassembler on the object code and you have exactly what the developers had, minus comments and variable names. So what are people petitioning for, really?

Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly

[Ed Avis]

a display driver for Windows to allow Windows apps to run across the network in a DESQview/X window

That in itself sounds damn useful. Assuming it uses the standard X protocol and not some Desqview extension. You could set up Windows 3.1 under dosemu, bochs or whatever with this display driver, and it would display on your X server. Hopefully in a 'rootless' style so no separate emulated screen was necessary. In any case it would be faster and with higher-res fonts than an emulated screen.

Must try this sometime. I wonder if Win9x can use these drivers...

Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly

[ChipX86]

I suspect the drivers are specific to DESQview/X. I also kind of doubt that the drivers work in Windows 95, but I could be wrong. I've never attempted it, but I think I remember reading about failed attempts.

Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly

[ChipX86]

A big assembly dump isn't as easy to read as nicely formatted and commented sourcecode :) However, I doubt anybody petitioning for this realized that it's all in assembly. It's not exactly common knowledge.

Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly

[mgblst]

Nothing wrong with assembly!

Another fabulous product Symantec discontined

[Meowharishi]

MORE. Anyone remember this? This is still, imho, hands down the best outliner and brainstorming piece of software ever developed.

It was for the Mac and discontinued about five years ago.

At its core it was just an outlining program but this it did so well (wayyyy better than MS Word)!

sigh... MS really did take the life out of the software industry when they really came of age in the 90's..

Re:Another fabulous product Symantec discontined

[Knobby]

I've never heard of MORE.. Is it anything like Omni's OmniOutliner?

Re:Another fabulous product Symantec discontined

[Anonymous Coward]

Symantec did NOT discontinue it. It was long gone by the time Symantec bought Quarterdeck. I don't even believe that Symantec got all or any of the source for it when all the assets were transfered.

Re:Another fabulous product Symantec discontined

[Anonymous Coward]

More was written by Dave Winer, and he's got a page up somewhere on of his sites (scripting.com, etc) about it.

Re:Another fabulous product Symantec discontined

[Jack Hughes]

Wow! Did a lot of work on writing course materials in More... (switched from Cricket Presents IIRC). It was a good application. Sadly, the Mac Classic that we had has died.

Switched to MS Word for a while.... not really as quick as More...

.. Today, the courses notes are all in XML and processed using a DocBook tool chain...

Re:Another fabulous product Symantec discontined

[Anonymous Coward]

Dave Winer (of UserLand/Scripting News fame) got the rights to his old software (MORE and ThinkTank) back from Symantec and has them available for download at www.outliners.com

Too bad it wasn't a few years ago...

[alexhmit01]

We were trying to add old BBS doors support to a friends BBS years ago, and we could either get a stack of 286s or a reasonable machine with Desqview 386. Well, Desqview wasn't on the market anymore, so we tried OS/2, Win95, and later WinNT, none would handle our doors. We tried to warez it but failled. We later tried a stack of 286s, but the systems weren't playing nicely with our NT Server (didn't have the expertise or budget for an admin for a Novell server).

A few years ago it would have been great for me. Maybe I'll drop the cash and try the system now...

Alex

Download for the X11 Type 1 fonts!

[Lobsang]

I used to be a heavy Desqview (no the X version) user. Nice product for its time. When desqview came, the whole product line was dying anyway. Even if you don't use it, you can download for the X11 (Type 1) fonts. They work really well with X11.

DOS 98 too, but don't DOS ME

[yerricde]

If you install w95 and then edit the msdos.sys file, you can add ... and the machine will start up to a command prompt.

However, you'll have to attrib -h -s -r msdos.sys before you can edit msdos.sys. I'll note that the Windows 95 procedure that wildcard023 gave works only on machines with 386 or higher processors, as some parts of DOS have been upgraded to 32-bit. It also works in Windows 98 and 98SE but not in Windows ME. Microsoft didn't want to release an operating system that would be called "DOS ME" because it didn't want kiddies to take that as a request for a packet flood. (What's the difference again between the Slashdot effect and a distributed non-spoofed SYN flood?)

Also, in all Windows 9x operating systems (including ME), you can get DOS by making an emergency boot disk.

Re:DOS 98 too, but don't DOS ME

[gfxguy]

Or you can run Tweak UI and click on the option to not boot the gui automatically. My 98SE disk comes with it on the CD. Otherwise it can be downloaded from MS.

Yes, it's easy to just edit the file, but TweakUI gives you a lot of other options, too.

desqview vs disk compression -- warning!

[Reziac]

Desqview was a great util... but one caveat:

Do NOT run it on a compressed drive (if anyone still has compressed drives in this era of cheap hard disks!) If you do, sooner or later it WILL eat the compressed volume file.

desqviewx will not run windows apps

[Skuld-Chan]

out of the box like they make it sound - it will run windows under desqview x if you already have ms-windows installed - at least thats how I remember it from years back. And it was a clunky way of running windows at that - as the poster stated you had to have 16 megs of ram - which an amazing amount when it came out. My guess is to run it smoothly you'd have to have like 32 or 64.

Re:A new low

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the funny part.

As computer scientists, the guys who run slashdot are decent editors.

As editors, they make decent computer scientists.

I don't mean that as a joke. If these guys are MIS or computer science guys, then have them go to an english writing seminar. And hire JonKatz (I don't believe its a real person) an editor who will kindly work with him to improve his style.

However, if these guys are journalists with an interest in computers, then there's no excuse for some of the grammatical slop around here.

They never seem to bring the right tools to the job.

That's "larned"

[Anonymous Coward]

Dagnabit!

I don't think that the sources can be released.

[Anonymous Coward]

Several points

1) The X that is part of DesQView iw XR4. Don't know how useful that is.

2) As a former employee of Symantec, I do remember that not all of the source code actually made it over from QuarterDeck and I believe that the source code for DesqView was part of that. From what I understand, former QuarterDeck employees wiped a large number of hard drives prior to leaving the company. I don;t think managment really cared as Cleansweep was really the only product that they were interested in, even though Procom also survived (Although management was not really interested in Procom that much)

Or not! (Dangerous site)

[J. T. MacLeod]

...I tried bootdisk.com once when I needed to create a boot disk for Win95b and didn't have it installed at the time. Looked harmless enough.

Then one of their disk sets (or the installer) *erased my partition table*.

Fortunately, I had all my data on an old drive (I'd just transferred to the new drive), but that COULD have been disastrous.

Stay away from bootdisk.com, for your own good. The site maintainers may not have known what they were hosting, but either way, you'd be taking a risk.

Re:A new low

[Matthew Luckie]

Slashdot really sucks. You know it, I know it.

One thing I have noticed lately is that the janitors do not update the front page even when obvious spelling and grammar mistakes are pointed out.

Perhaps the janitors are trolling their readers by posting these "articles" and then watching how many people bite at the spelling and grammar. I've noticed that the posts that point out corrections are moderated as offtopic, encouraging many more readers to point out the same errors as they do not see that it has been done before.

Some Bitching

[PD]

Alright, I know there are some people who read about these things and get all teary eyed as they relive their youth again. Not me. I was a college student with my 386SX, running MS-DOS. All I wanted to do was run an editor in one window, and Microsoft C 5.1 in the other window. I had hardly any money at all to spend on this stuff. The computer cost me $900 with a lot of scrounged parts, and I could barely afford that. The compiler belonged to my boss. Tuition bills were killing me.

I bought Desqview thinking that would help. It didn't, because it just partitioned the 640K into chunks that were too small. Also, it kept crashing . I spent a lot of time booting my computer. So, I got QEMM to go along with that. I think that I spent $150 for both of them. The QEMM gave me more memory, but it crashed even MORE. I couldn't work that way. Little did I know that it would be more than 3 years before I could move away from MS-DOG onto a real system that would accommodate a poor person AND not crash - Linux.

I have no illusions that those days with MS-DOS were the "good old days." I am forever in the debt of Linus Torvalds and his operating system, and it's all I can do to forget pissing away money that I couldn't really afford to spend, trying to get a Microsoft OS to just plain work. It was a nightmare that I never want to think about ever again.

Re:Some Bitching

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, fuck off. You're nothing but a flag-waver like all the other zealots around this place. How come the vast majority of everyone else got such a setup running fine? My old DOS/FrontDoor/Remote Access BBS machine ran for three years without a minute of downtime. Not one. And, I wasn't the only one with similar results.

Maybe you are just completely incompetant behind the keyboard. You think?

Re:Some Bitching

[PD]

Your setup worked because you weren't doing anything that stressed the machine. All you did was run a measley BBS and some doors. That's nothing at all compared to what I was doing: C programming. Stray pointers still brought the machine down.

Re:Some Bitching

[xtremex]

I agree with the original poster. I HATED DOS and everything it stood for. While me and my friends had AMigas with 16,000 colors and a full gui in 1988 the rest of the world sold out to MSDOS!!!! Why?? I STILL have no clue.

Re:A new low

[1010011010]

Which "English" should we be using, oh great arbitrator of language?

Any english would do. I don't think that news article would be considered well written by any english speaker from any century.

"Peaked"
"Pete sake"

Fonicks. Good when you're in elementary school, but not meant to eb the end of one's education.

Re:A new low

[1010011010]

Oh, hell, I made a typo. How embarassing.

Is this really true?

[pdcull]

Has anyone actually confirmed that this is true?

I've been unable to access the site http://disvr.cjb.net/freedv referenced in the article. If this is an offical Symantec decision, why aren't the binaries available from http://www.symantec.com? I just searched their site for the word "DesqView" and found no mention of this supposed release.

The alternative http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html posted here contains binaries but I can't see any mention of any official announcement by Symantec about the binaries now being in Public Domain.

The site http://www.freemm.org/DesqView%20X/, also mentioned in postings here on Slashdot, (and last updated Wed Apr 11 2001) says the following:

I built this page as soon as I heard that DesqView/X is available. As soon as I confirm the legality of the download, I will load the binaries up on this site. For right now, you can download DesqView/X from Amos Vryhof's page at: http://disvr.cjb.net/freedv/. There are also many useful links there

It seems to me that this rumour has been around for a few months now.

Finally, if this is true, why isn't there any announcements about it on comp.os.msdos.desqview?. And why did Amos Vryhof, presumably the owner of http://disvr.cjb.net/freedv recently start his own OpenDVX project on Sourceforge?

I'd love for it to be true, but until I see some official announcement from Symantec, I can't say that I believe it.

Re: Desqview

[Abstrakt]

I remember having to use DESQVIEW to multitask when I was running my BBS off of MSDOS.

Ahh the memories! You haven't lived until you've tried to set up a two-node board and a FidoNet mailer under DESQview 386. ;)

I ran such a setup for many years with TriBBS, until I finally switched to PCBoard and OS/2 3.0... Everything was much smoother under OS/2 -- no more random lock-ups and slowdowns!

I miss ANSi art tremendously, too. Used to spend way too much time messing around in TheDraw...

Cheers.

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you never heard of groups like Future Crew and Renaissance.. the demo scene wasn't just for Amiga you know. There was a HUGE PC demo scene in the early 90s.

Re:Whatever

[uradu]

> There was a HUGE PC demo scene in the early 90s.

Early 90s? We're talking mid- to late 80s here, back when the PC was spending 80% of its CPU cycles servicing the keyboard. There wasn't much to demo on the PC back then.

-

Re:A new low

[chromatic]

As the submitter produced the entire story text, it's not fair to blame DiBona for this one.

What's the solution? Should the editors silently correct misspellings and questionable grammar? Should they add "[sic]" after every mistake? Should they reject a submission or rephrase it in their own words?

(This discussion probably belongs here, though.)

Re: Desqview

[PONA-Boy]

TriBBS...long live the bored, *ahem*, BOARD!!!

TriBBS was truly great, though. Not only that, but I _did_ program in RIPscript. I also helped run a PCBoard BBS running on DESQview. We used a PPP gateway with it to provide access to the Internet.

Damn, where's my qwk reader??? BLUE WAVE TO THE RESCUE!!!

-PONA-
King of the Who?.sig

Re:A new low

[dublin]

I'll get modded down for this, but xah is absolutely right here. Slashdot, which has always walked the ragged edge of illiteracy, has lately become an absolute crapfest of linguistic carelessness and ignorance.

Don't we care about the quality of what we're saying? If we don't, we shouldn't post at all. Perhaps this the the linguistic spawn of the grunge movement - the textual equivalent of the filthy jeans, stringy unwashed hair, odoriforous clothing, and replusive tatoos and piercings that were so common when jobs were plentiful, but thankfully seem to be much scarcer these days.

It would be nice to be able to filter posts that commit Englicide, something broader in scope than simply blocking Jon Katz. ;-) As I think about it, I realize I may only be half joking: If there can be a lameness filter for submissions, surely there can be one of a different type for viewing, one that will help demoronize Slashdot by automatically modding down posts that confuse "than" and "then", use "alot", botch "there/their", etc. The real question is whether or not there would be more than a handful of posts left after such an filter was loosed...

Re:A new low

[Anonymous Coward]

College? The grammar isn't even at the 4th grade level.

sorry, scientologiest alert.

[Anonymous Pancake]

since symantec is owned by a scientologist, it is unlikely they will release their software as open source. I doubt they would want anyone to see the secret logging software included in it to stamp out anti-scientologist speach.

Re:A new low

[khuber]

P.S. Which "English" should we be using, oh great arbitrator of language?

You probably meant "great arbiter", not "great arbitrator". I guess it means the same thing, but it doesn't sound right.

Carry on.

-Kevin

Re:Some corrections...quibble on Pete!

[Genghis Troll]

You are going straight to hell, motherfucker.

Router

[Anonymous Coward]

I use freesco (linux) for a router...it uses a bootstrap scenaria to start linux..you boot to dos...could you run desqview and allow yourself to have a dos console at the same time as the router was running?

Re:This is ridiculous - NT != OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so it is OS/2 (M$-branded) and not NT, as pointed out by the predecessor to your reponse (if a bit ungracefully). 1.3 was the last version jointly developed by M$ and IBM before OS/2 2.x, was developed solely by IBM (IIRC), and which replaced the Presentation Manager (PM) shell with the much more advanced, object-oriented WorkPlace Shell (WPS). PM does resemble the early NT 3.x shells, which were more or less modeled after the Windows 3.x shell.

The fact remains that those are 2 completely separate operating systems from completely separate development teams. M$ hired David Cutler from Digital Equipment Corp, DEC, (now owned by Compaq) to create NT as an alternative to partnering with IBM to develop a replacement for DOS/Windows 3. It's pretty well documented on the 'Net if you care to search.

Re:A new low

[khuber]

Should the editors silently correct misspellings and questionable grammar?

I'd like it if the Slashdot editors at least
spellchecked the submissions. I personally have a
hard time reading some of them. I don't recall
Slashdot editors ever doing much editing though.

-Kevin

Re: Desqview

[jfunk]

Y'know, I thought that all of those terrible mmories of seeing RIP graphics were gone from my brain.

Lo and behold, an image formed into my head that will stay there like a train wreck for quite a while. That terrible, terrible grey, and the grey... and did I mention the grey? And why did everyone see fit to use yellow text on it.

Arrrgh, make it stop.

Ahh.. I used this for running a multi-line wwiv

[upstart1234]

wwiv bbs software ran GREAT under this software package.. it was the best way to get wwiv to do mulit lines.. I loved this program.

Re:A new low

[Anonymous Coward]

"Which "English" should we be using"

It doesn't matter. Just pick one that isn't horribly broken. And don't fucking mix them!

Desqview Patented Overlapping Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Quarterdeck actually received a patent for the "overlapping windows" concept they used in this product.

Caused quite a furor at the time -- even had MS worried because Windows used overlapping windows.

http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/txt/ep/0344/08 2/

Running Internet Explorer on Linux with it?

[Nailer]

Ancient X apps and Windows 3.1 applications?

If Deskview/X goes Open Source, there might be a Linux port. There's 16 bit versions of Internet exporer 4.01SP2 and I think there might be a 16Bit 5.0 too. Combine them with Desqview /X and you might have IE under Linux : )

Tho Wine will probably do it soon enough anyway. Just a thought.

FYI: it's piqued, not peaked. -nt

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

Dammit!

[AVryhof]

The one day my system is offline, I make the front page of Slashdot.... Dammit all to hell!

Just to correct a few misconceptions. It is true, that Desqview/X does NOT run Windows applications without Windows in one of it's windows. Moreover, it is not public domain. I am working hard with people at Symantec to get the rights, but until then it is illegal to decompile or reverse engineer Desqview/X!

As for an OpenSource version of Desqview/X, I am looking for developers to work on it. It is Here! I am getting all of the original documentation, and have all of the original API toolkits.

If your into X, and DOS join the crew, and maybe some good can come of this!

Have a nice night, and I think this will spark enough interest to push Symantec in the right direction.

-AV

Re:Dammit!

[pdcull]

So, you're the owner of the site referenced in the article?

Two quick questions:

1. Is your site up now?

2. Do you have anything in writing from Symantec allowing the distribution of the binaries?

Or is the story basically lies, in which case Slashdot has just turned into the biggest warez site on the web.

Re:Dammit!

[AVryhof]

No, the site is not up now. It will not be up again until next week when it will no olnger get hammered by millions of people.

As I have said many times in many places. NO, Desqview/X is NOT Free. As far as where the submitter got the idea that it was free, I have no idea.

So, anyone who comes back to my site after the onslaught of slashdotters to download Desqview/X, you are doing it unlawfully. But, until the link to my site is off the frontpage of Slashdot, there is no site.

-AV

of course

[Trepidity]

Even if that were true (which I don't believe it is - they are two separate copyrights), nothing obligates you to release the source code. Even if you have renounced your copyright on it, all that means is that it's not now illegal to copy it. But if you have the only copy, you can still refuse to give it to people.

I used Dv/X at the U.S.D.A.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work as a stat's programmer for the USDA back in the day. Used Dv/X mostly due to it's ability to run X apps, but also as it ran lots of our stats apps faster than windows did. I must say that seeing it go was quite sad, but then I found Linux. Let DvX die quietly, it was cool in its day.

RE

I used to run Wildcat under this.. before OS/2 :)

[cybrthng]

I used to run my mutiline wildcat on this. Believe it or not it was a 2 node wildcat system on Desqview running on a 286. I upgraded two Desqview/386 with QEMM when i got my hellah fast 386DX40 from AMD.

Nothing like the day of tweaking fossile drivers, setting priority and multitasking in DOS.

Then came along OS/2 :) haha. Believe it or not i was the first OS/2 bbs carying GNU linux for download on my 19.2 softmodem.

If you can find it on google it was the "Linux BBS List". You can see my lowly bored as the one that was "long distance to some areas".. I couldn't afford the metro line fees on my lowly 12 year old allowance.

hahaha

Dancing like it's 1989...

[coupland]

Well this was awesome software in the 80's... If it had been released open source a decade ago when it was still new it would have redefined the OS world. As it stands it is only average at best... Next!

Some useful code

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a bit of useful code, but not much. Only thing that impressed the hell out of me was the speed of the thing. It could do scrolling virtual desktops on hardware from that era. Nothing else came close in video speed.

DESQview/X to Other X Systems

[legis]

The site is Slashdoted. If it is the same as the ones on http://www.chsoft.com then they haven't released the real interesting package which is "DESQview/X to Other X Systems". That package would allow DesQview/X to function as an X server.

Re:Metallica/Danzig

[Anonymous Coward]

Metallica are horrible sellouts and Danzig is a midget. Listen to Morbid Angel, you poofy-haired idiot.

Re:This is ridiculous - NT != OS/2

[spauldo]

I didn't state that quite right - I didn't mean to say that NT was OS/2. Rather I was talking about the particular niche that was filled.

The old OS/2 and NT both were designed to be used for servers and high-end workstations. Since NT didn't exist as its own, the closest MS product was OS/2.

As to how much code was used from OS/2 in the early NT versions, I don't know. I am aware that the kernels are different, but there's several simularities beyond simple look and feel between the two. That could just be becuse of similar design though.

Low-cost XTerminal / use for obsolete hardware

[nikolaus]

Given that the base HW req's for DV/X are so low (by today's standards), this might let us nip two persistent problems:

1. How do we make old computer hardware useful?

2. How do we get low-cost computers to lots of people?

Set up a bunch of 486s, or P-Is running DV/X, give them each a Gnome or KDE desktop running on some other server, and let people surf, or whatever. One high power machine, lots of terminals.

ObPine:

I remember drooling over DV/X back in the day ... I ran DV on my 386DX-25 for two reasons: I had 8MB of RAM and DV let me use ALL of it, and it let me do modem-intensive apps in the background. I never "up" graded to DV/X, though - hadn't the $$, and I fell into Linux in the 0.99 days.

Re:Low-cost XTerminal / use for obsolete hardware

[d^2b]

Ummm. Well, 16MB is not that low, by the
standards of the time. I ran Sun Sparcstations
(ELC) and the roughly equivalent 486 DX2/66
with this amount of memory.

They both ran X fine. KDE or GNOME, no. X yes.

So maybe you should petition to opensource
Linux 0.whatever or FreeBSD 2.2.5 :-)

SunOS 4.1 was also pretty lean. Obligatory
flamewar about slowlaris omitted due to extreme boredom.

Re: Desqview

[CrabCakeJimmy2k]

I ran a 4 node BBS using Vbbs under DesqView. I remember the agony I went trhough trying to create rip graphics for it. I finally canned 'em all and cocenrtated on the ascii. Man, those were the days. Back then we were GODS my friends. I am SYSOP

Actually it's "piqued"

[Anonymous Coward]

*LOL*

Re:This is ridiculous - NT != OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, early in it's development, Windows NT was known as OS/2 NT, and some bits of code made it from OS/2 into NT and continue on in your modern XP system. So to say that they are "completely separate" is overstating the case.

But exporting DOS via X *was* a cool feature

[billstewart]

That *was* one of the cool features of DV/X - it meant that you could have one machine running DOS, and all of your Unix machines could run DOS applications in an X window (or at least N of them at a time could.) I don't remember if that was just DOS, or some of the primitive Windows modes, but either way it was potentially really useful for its time.

Unfortunately, the spare 486 walked out of my lab before I could implement it.

Re:DesqView/X and serial port sharing...

[Safety Cap]

one of the most usefull features of DesqView/X was the ability to remotely access serial ports on another machine.

Yeah, that remote access concept was fun. There was a machine across the street in the developers' area that was running DVX. For some reason it had a microphone on it (this is back in the early 90's when such things were really cool), so we would rexec the sound recorder on that box and then pick up the files. As I recall, the sound files from that box were too poor to really hear anything, bit it was fun watching the sound meter go whenever someone had a conversation in the vicinity.

Nowadays, we'd probably be caught and tried as terrorists under the Patriot© act, but in those days most folks were trusting...

Re:A new low

[CrackersnSoup]

Why not let people edit there posts aftwards? Yes I know there is a "preview" button. If I dont see the error before i post, I most likely wont see it 30 seconds later. Thats me, You might be different. Crackers`n`Soup

Re: Desqview

[MindStalker]

Hmm I remember spending the entire summer of 1989 creating aweomse ascii graphics for the "SixPack BBS" I was the sysop named "The_Drunkard". Only to have my parents decide they didn't want the extra phone line anymore on the same day it went live.

Re:Where can I find DOS? - bootdisk.com

[p0rkmaster]

http://www.bootdisk.com - you can get a fully installable copy of DR-DOS 7.0 there.

Here's Another Obscure x86 OS

[cjsnell]

Do any of y'all remember TSX-32? Well, I shouldn't say "remember", as it is still alive and well. I first found out about the TSX-32 Operating System back when I was in high school in 1992. The neat thing about this OS was that it was multi-user and had virtual consoles way before I had even heard of Linux. Anywho, it's still around and you can download the shareware version from their Web site.

Chris

Re:A new low

[lucius]

I don't think "arbitrator" is really a word, or if it is, it shouldn't be. Same situation for "obligated" and "obliged".

Secret source code cannot be copyrighted

[markb]

If the source code is secret, then it cannot be copyrighted. Copyrights are only for things that are published.

Re:Secret source code cannot be copyrighted

[fyonn]

no, thats patents. anything you write is copywrited by default (due to the berne convention I believe) whether you publish it or not. if you cracked into m$ and handed the windows souce to all and sundry I'm sure copyright would catch you eventually.

dave

Re:Secret source code cannot be copyrighted

[markb]

No, trade secrets != copyrights.

Re:Secret source code cannot be copyrighted

[fyonn]

okay, so thats true, but it would also be a breach of copyright. my point is that you a) don't have to copyright anything, is it by it's nature copyrighted by virtue of you having created it and b) you don't have to ublish it anywhere which you have to do with patents

dave

Re: Desqview

[xQx]

PCBoard in one corner, Telix in the other. Those were the days.

I had DesQview386 and NOBODY gave me ONE GOOD reason to move to that awful Windows 3.1 product.

It wasn't until `96 that I gave into the beast.

(Yes, I am aware of the fact I was using MICROSOFT dos. I know that. Still, it's not giving into the beast because MSDOS was really QDOS. At least they said in the name of the product it was quick and dirty. And it was quick. Quicker than 95,98,NT,2k or XP ever are.)

Re:A new low

[Anonymous Coward]

Main Entry: arbitrator
Pronunciation: 'är-b&-"trA-t&r
Function: noun
Date: 15th century
: one that arbitrates : ARBITER

Re: Desqview

[Ed Avis]

If you look on Simtel there are at least two Desqview-a-like DOS multitaskers, shareware or freeware. But no graphics. In fact it's amazing the amount of weird shit in the Simtel DOS archive.

Re:A new low

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Which "English" should we be using, oh great arbitrator of language?

> Any english would do. I don't think that news article would be considered well written by any english speaker from any century.

There's only one Standard English, which happens to be that which the English Royals speak. Everybody else has an accent, by definition, and all that Yankee claptrap with the wrong spellings doesn't even come close! Color, harbor, center! Fucking laziness!

...and don't get me started on all those words your various presidents have mispronounced, like "nucular" or "normalcy", (It's NORMALITY, dammit! Just because FDR got it wrong, doesn't mean the dictionary had to change!). Then there's AdSpeak, CB Jargon, and Ebonics!

Re:A new low

[minus9]

In defense of this article, I would like to point out that at least X was spelled correctly.

real time control system with DV/X

[fea]

I forgot to mention in my previous post that we also used DV/X (about 1990-1991) for a near-real-time simulation and control system. We had a simulator of a nuclear power plant programed in FORTRAN running in one window of DV/X. In the other window we had an I/O interface transfering data between the simulator and a *REAL* control system that was connected to the *REAL* instruments. The signals to the instruments were simulated, but it was a live system. It worked pretty well and allowed us BFI (brute force and ignorance) engineers to get paid for a digital control system development on a nuclear power plant without having to pay big bucks to interface and program a real-time operating system. And, incidently, the digital controller is still in use today and the regulators approved the system.

DesqVeiw/X has NOT been released...

[dmlloyd]

to my knowledge.

As author of the petetion (Well, not that there really is a "petetion" persay), I feel I need to clarify this point.

I have been in correspondance with a former Symantec/Quarterdeck employee who was talking with an internal contact, who said:

Got an answer to your request for DV(/X) to be made [Public Domain]: no.

The long and the short of it was "for the time and effort needed to release these as PD products, how does Symantec benefit other than from a feeling of goodwill from some users?". Essentially, they want a dollar-amount specified to quantify how SYMC can benefit from freeing these products.

When presented with the argument that "No "time and effort" on Symantec's part would be involved, other than signing off on a statement releasing them to the public domain, just as Lineo has done with CP/M.", the internal contact repied:

You missed my point. That's part of the problem in that it has to be approved by the PM, the Group PM, the division VP, and legal. Since there's no money in it for Symantec, or any big benefit, they're not going to do it. The CP/M example works for a small company. Symantec isn't small.

I think that the best chance to have something DVX-like is to join Amos Vryhof's project listed elsewhere on this forum.

Desqview is nice for multitasking

[chrysalis]

I used Desqview (not /X) for its multitasking capabilities to run a BBS. Worked like a charm. It was a truly multitasking OS way before Windows 95.

Re:Old *source code* not always releaseable

[zoward]

People also forget that "releasing the source code" entails a pass through it to clean up bad code, no-ops, and, particularly, comments. How many times have you looked though the source code to something and seen comments like:

/* Warning - *MASSIVE* kludge below */

or

/* I had to do it this way because Fred was too
*&^%$ lazy to code for this in the base
libraries */

Companies don't want customers to see this kind of thing, even in ten year old codebases. Even for companies who are willing to release their old binaries, it's hard to justify the time it takes to clean up the source code for release. Personally, I think Borland deserves kudos for treating this as abandonware and releasing the binaries. Let's hope more companies follow suit.

Re:A new low

[HermDog]

Why not let people edit their posts afterwards? Yes, I know there is a "preview" button. If I don't see the error before I post, I most likely won't see it 30 seconds later. That's me. You might be different. Crackers`n`Soup

HTH

Re: Desqview

[mitheral]

That's 'cause there is so much weird stuff for DOS. One needed most of it to be even half way productive.

Re: Desqview

[ncc74656]

Ahh the memories! You haven't lived until you've tried to set up a two-node board and a FidoNet mailer under DESQview 386. ;)

I ran such a setup for many years with TriBBS, until I finally switched to PCBoard and OS/2 3.0... Everything was much smoother under OS/2 -- no more random lock-ups and slowdowns!

Well, my old BBS had only one line, but I ran it under DESQview on top of DR DOS 6 on a 286 and then on a 386SX. It never so much as hiccuped (except when the power supply started acting up). I went through a couple of BBS packages before settling on Maximus for the BBS itself and Opus for connecting to Fight-O-Net. Both were free (as in beer) and fairly customizable. With DESQview, I could have the BBS up while I read messages through an offline reader or transferred files to/from my Apple II.

DESQview ruled. OS/2 was pretty decent (snagged a free copy of v3.0 at Fall Comdex '94), but IBM succeeded at snatching failure from the jaws of victory.

Re: Desqview

[zillahX]

Renegade ... 'nuff said

"piqued," not "peaked."

[pturley]

EOM

Elvis lives!

[michaelbolton]

Why would Slashdot users be so credulous? a) Why would they believe that Symantec would release DESQview/X (or any other Quarterdeck product) into the public domain? b) Why would they not check the Symantec site for a press release or any other information for any suggestion or evidence that this rumour is true? c) Why would they not bother to check the link at which the code allegedly resides to see if there's relationship there to Symantec? d) Why would they not do a WHOIS search on the cjb.net to see if they're linked to Symantec? All the reminiscences have been fun (accurate or not; not even Gary Pope's nephew got it right--DESQview/X could indeed run Standard Mode Windows programs on a DV/X machine, and better yet turned those Windows programs into X clients, allowing the user to sit at any box on the network and access any app s/he liked), but why are we so eager to discuss what is or isn't public domain, what does or doesn't constitute multitasking, and what does or doesn't constitute open source when the initial post was bullshit anyway? Aren't we supposed to be sophisticated, discerning, and clear-thinking boys and girls here? I'll give a souvenir copy of the DV manual to the first person that can demonstrate that Symantec has done anything at all with DESQview/Anything other than to bury it as deeply as possible in its corporate basement suite with the crazy uncle. ---Michael B. (ex-Quarterdeck)

Re:A new low

[fishbowl]

The language skills demonstrated by Slashdot editors
would amount to failing freshman English in any
University worthy of the name.

Screen needs regions like DV/386 windows

[fishbowl]

screen(1) needs to have rectangular regions like
desqview (not dv/x) had. It would also be quite
nice to be able to map "{alt}{alt}" to switch tasks,
and there are probably a few other things that would
be nice that I can't think of right now.

But to me, being able to setup all my windows in
various rectangles of a console would be GREAT, and
is the main feature missing from screen.

Re:DesqView/X and serial port sharing...

[garyrich]

Do I know you? If so, you are remembering sideways. The mike was on an SGI machine, we did evesdropping from DV/X bozes. Much more fun was the SGI with its mike on in the board room.

Re: Desqview

[Rasta Prefect]

Yeah, wasn't it great to spend hours working on RIP graphics only to figure out that there was exactly 1 person on your board willing to go through the hassle to use them? Not to mention that ASCII graphics were a much. much faster way to get around the board. Can't waste those precious connect minutes!

Why haven't the Slashdot editors retracted this?

[pdcull]

According to the owner of the site refered to in the article:

As I have said many times in many places. NO, Desqview/X is NOT Free. As far as where the submitter got the idea that it was free, I have no idea.

The story is spurious. Misleading. False. Symantec haven't released the binaries as public domain.

Come on Slashdot, you can do better than that. At least an offical acknowledgement that you've run a misleading story is in order...

You are both under arrest

[konmaskisin]

... as threats to the "Homeland".

:)

[ecampbel]

n/t

Re:Low-cost XTerminal / Networking in DOS??

[Trilobyte]

> Set up a bunch of 486s, or P-Is running DV/X,
> give them each a Gnome or KDE desktop running
> on some other server, and let people surf, or
> whatever. One high power machine, lots of
> terminals.

That's a good idea, but how in the world are you supposed to network these machines? That free open-source version of Novell Netware? [Blink?]

Does anybody know of any free Ethernet TCP/IP networking software (with NIC drivers!) for MS-DOS or FreeDOS or DR-DOS? Because this could open the door to having a bunch of cheap MS-DOS-based X terminals... definitely a conversation piece for geeks. I think I already know a few dumpsters with 486s for me to rescue...

[Reminiscing: I remember I could only run regular DesqView on my old 486SX/25 with 4mb RAM, but my friend with his DX2-66 (!) and 16mb RAM (!!) could run DesqView/X and I was SO JEALOUS. It looked like the future of the PC (even though DV/X was already outdated)... that great X GUI of Linux, in only 8 megs of RAM, on MS-DOS! And so fast! But alas... it never caught on... so I bought an Amiga]

Qdesk's other Win32 X-Window Server : eXpertise

[markstinson]

I used to work for Quarterdeck once they bought Datastorm (Procomm Plus). One product that Symantic has in their possession is eXpertise

This is a Win16/Win32 X-Window Server that came on 5 floppy disk set. It would run on Win3.1 & Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (besides Win95). And it came with tons of decent features:

• X11R6 Compliant
• Local or Remote Window Managers
• 24 bit color
• Virtual Screens (would like that Rooted or Rootless)
• Cut and Paste between Windows & X-Windows
• Print output from local Windows Printer

Too bad Symantic hasn't released this into the Public Domain. It's a very reasonable X-Windows Server.

The other alternative for small X Servers is to go with MI/X or WeirdX (Java X Server)

Later, Markus

Re:DesqView/X and serial port sharing...

[Safety Cap]

You sure do! I'm "Uncle Larry's" nephew!

You are right about the SGI box - too many brain cells dead since then. Every time I make it back to LA, I somehow always end up driving by 150 pico. It hasn't changed all that much. :)

DESQview/X ran Win3.1

[castlan]

According to this screenshot DESKview/X ran Win3.1 Apps in a rooted style, with the win3.1 Desktop in one Window on the X server.