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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!"
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.
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.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
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 If its abandonware, then it has fallen so out of date that there is no point in keeping it hidden.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 That's great if you're still coding in outdated setups.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.
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
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
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
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).
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...
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
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.
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!