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The Software That Failed To Compete With Windows

Posted by kdawson on from the rear-view-mirror-of-history dept.

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."

2 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Desqview by TheDarkener · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
    1. Re:DESQview by Tanktalus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.