The Software That Failed To Compete With Windows

harrymcc writes "When Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0 back in November 1985 — it turned 25 on Saturday — it wasn't clear that its much-delayed windowing add-on for DOS was going to succeed. After all, it was a late arrival to a market that was already teeming with ambitious competitors. A quarter-century later, it's worth remembering the early Windows rivals that didn't make it: Visi On, Top View, GEM, DESQview, and more."

Comments

Desqview

[TheDarkener]

was awesome. I used it to run multiple nodes on my Renegade BBS. Of course, back then nothing was truly multitasking, but this was pretty darn stable for its time. We moved to Windows '95 when we were told that it would provide better multitasking abilities.

It was at that point I started truly despising Windows/Microsoft. "What are all of these files in my root directory?" I remember exclaiming. I always kept a very organized filesystem, and now my operating system was telling me I couldn't do that anymore.

It was all pretty much downhill from there.

Re:Desqview

[dada21]

Lord I miss those days. I ran Renegard multinode until I bought MajorBBS (which was really efficient, but proprietary).

Remember the Extended versus Expanded memory hub-bub way back when? 640K is enough for anyone!

Re:DESQview

[Tanktalus]

I started running my BBS under DESQview. However, I then wanted to learn to program C++, and went out and bought Borland C++ for Windows. Silly me. At least it was the student edition (read: cheap). So I thought, well, Windows 3.1 claims to multitask DOS apps, so why not try it? Well, just running the single DOS app under Windows, not even having anything else loaded, on a 486dx2/66 w/16MB RAM, resulted in users complaining about speed - on their 2400 baud modems. So I knew that was a no-go.

Then, someone at work (I was a co-op student at the time) suggested OS/2. After buying a student copy of that, too, I installed it. I could run two nodes of the BBS at 33.6kbps PLUS compile under Windows, or I could run one node AND use the other modem to connect to the internet via the university, and load up a web browser and do all of that stuff while the DOS BBS continued to run just fine.

Later I switched from Renegade to Maximus which had a native OS/2 version. Used a lot less resource that way, but even then, Renegade for DOS still *worked* under OS/2, which is more than I could say for the same machine running DOS 5.0 / Windows 3.1.

I continued with OS/2 for years, and avoid Windows still, just because it has never, in my estimation, been able to handle what I threw at OS/2, or now throw at Linux. I still miss the OO desktop OS/2 had, that and the Extended Attributes. They were really really useful things - metadata attached to a file that when you removed the file, the metadata automatically went away. Brilliance. Copy the file, the metadata copies along. Move the file, the metadata moves with it. Absolute brilliance. The 64KB limit might have been a bit low to continue on into today, but the idea was still awesome.

GEM

[blind biker]

GEM was a damn good piece of software. It was actually multiplatform (CP/M on 8088 and 68000, DOS (any CPU), and I think I saw floppies of GEM for the Commodore 64.

Incredibly powerful considering the tiny resources it needed. One of the first DTP softwares, Ventura, was based on GEM for its user interface.

Like X, GEM isn't quite an operating system. It's a graphical shell. Well... more or less what Windows 1.0 was!

Deskmate

[coolmoose25]

I had a Tandy 1000 (still do actually) and ran Deskmate during the Windows 1.0 days... It is hard for people to understand just how messy things were in those days... printer drivers were essentially non-existent and you had to embed printer commands in documents if you were doing anything fancy (meaning different fonts or sizes). There were a plethora of TSR programs (Terminate-Stay Resident) like Sidekick. There were all kinds of hacks to make your machine use memory above 640k. Deskmate was basically something more similar to the Office suite than a real Windows replacement. There were all kinds of menuing programs at the time, many of them shareware, that would essentially allow you to build a simple application launch screen. Deskmate did a pretty fair job of documents and rudimentary spreadsheets... It was the MS Works of its day. Other applications like Lotus 123 and dBase (or Clipper) were the norm - and you ran one of them at a time. (No multitasking) So Windows 1.0 was basically a fancy menu program and as TFA points out, it had many competitors... It wasn't until Windows 2.1 came out that it advanced any farther than that...

Re:I see dead people

[Teun]

Yep very likely, it's only a few years ago a Public Notary in Louisiana asked me to have a look at her 'puter and it was running Windows 1.0.

Although I'm since 1979 in IT I had never before seen this stuff...

But knowing DOS and Win3.11 I managed to get it working again :)

Re:I used to use GEM / Ventura

[HBI]

You didn't use Desqview appropriately, then.

With QEMM loaded on a 386 platform and lots of available memory, Desqview was a superior multitasker that would run raw DOS applications simultaneously. No special coding required, though if you did code to TopView/DV then more applications could be run simultaneously.

I ran 4 nodes of a DOS multinode BBS, along with door applications, on a single 386-20 DV box with 4MB of RAM. Searchlight, then Wildcat, if you are interested.

Easily kept up with the modems. In fact, the lack of a multiport serial board was more the reason why I didn't run more nodes than any inherent limitation of DV. There was plenty of CPU to spare.

The only limitation DV really had was that it didn't arbitrate hardware misconfigurations. Therefore, if you tried to use the same ports/IRQ lines from different windows, you could lock the system hard. Assuming you weren't doing anything stupid, though, it was great stuff. Also, doing BIOS video output made it easier for DV to control the output. Most applications did direct screen writes, so you were kind of stuck with the overhead unless you wrote your own code. I did, so using BIOS output was an option for me.