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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!"
You want FreeDOS, free as in beer and GPL too. It works very well.
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
DESQview/X 2.1 is available for download from http://www.chsoft.com
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FREEdisk
The future isn't what it used to be.
http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html
a pp s.desqview-x.html
http://www.freemm.org/DesqView X/
http://www.bookcase.com/library/software/msdos.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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
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.
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. ;)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Have a look at:
http://www.bootdisk.com
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Uh dude... the tandy thing was Deskmate... not desqview.
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.
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).
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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...
try this link
http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html
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.
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
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)
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:
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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
Make America grate again!
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.