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

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 If its abandonware, then it has fallen so out of date that there is no point in keeping it hidden.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 That's great if you're still coding in outdated setups.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.

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: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 *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.