[HN Gopher] DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future
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DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future
Author : WoodenChair
Score : 213 points
Date : 2021-11-30 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lunduke.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lunduke.substack.com)
| pedrow wrote:
| This sounds like it would need a lot of RAM to run (or, at least,
| more than was common in 1994). Can anyone comment on its system
| requirements?
| eatfish wrote:
| Around that time DOS programs were still being written to fit
| within 640KB of memory. However PC's were starting to be
| shipped with 2, 4 or even 8MB of RAM - memory really was a
| solution in search of a problem at that point. Windows 3.1 was
| the primary application for all that memory. But what if you
| didn't want, or need, to run Windows 3.1? Well that's where
| DESQview fit in. You could task switch between DOS programs
| instead using all that sweet memory (but not really, because
| DOS doesn't multitask, so 4 switchable ttys of DOS programs is
| a better description)
| randombits0 wrote:
| Well, it was all about exploiting the memory management
| features of the 80386. DesqView was an interface to new
| hardware architecture that supported multi-tasking the old
| model, DOS with all it's memory hacks, exceptionally well. It
| was a natural for running the hell out of current model, but it
| was doomed to fail to more sophisticated OS products that would
| exploit the same power.
|
| DesqView/X was the same product bundled with some very good X
| server/client components. Think of it as an X client as well as
| a local system manager running any x86 component.
|
| The shit was really ahead of it's time.
|
| Edit: Oh, you asked about resource requirements. Yes, and yes.
| Fortunately, DOS binaries aren't large, but it's all relative.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Far too much? IIRC the first version "technically" could run on
| a 286/2mb but they went to 386 only almost immediately. IIRC
| 4mb was pretty common by then among anyone who could be using
| it.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| By 1992, 1993 most machines were shipping with around 4MB.
| The 486DX/50 I got (I believe fall 93) was an 8MB machine.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| For awhile in the early 90s, McAfee Associates FTP server ran on
| a box running DESQview/X. It was the first time you could
| download Viruscan/Virushield over the internet, rather than
| getting it off a floppy or BBS.
| gyoza wrote:
| I used this to play games and run my bbs at the same time lmao
| pengaru wrote:
| I tried doing that but it crashed my system more often than
| not.
|
| Then I got a copy of os/2 warp and never looked back, only
| moving on when I received an infomagic 4 cd set of linux
| distros.
| jweir wrote:
| Oh I remember... I was a young lad and I thought this was the
| future! So much so I bought stock in Quaterdeck.
|
| That didn't work out so well. Good to learn those lessons young.
| pantulis wrote:
| Quarterdeck really had some dope stuff those days, they were
| great. Sorry your investment didnt pan out!
| emersonrsantos wrote:
| Could never play with this because it was a paid product and the
| company didn't have any offers on my country.
| time4tea wrote:
| Interesting, hadnt heard of Desqview for years. Think maybe it
| got X server and client mixed up?
| ttyyzz wrote:
| There's a button that says "Button" :)
| pan69 wrote:
| I remember running DesqView (without the X) in the early 90's, it
| must have been on a 286 (is that possible?), I only got a 486
| around 1994.
|
| I remember being impressed by the fact that I could run multiple
| applications at the same time and switch between them. I think I
| ran a BBS at the time (a combination of Frontdoor and something
| else... the memory is thin).
|
| I vaguely remember excitingly showing my parents, probably my
| mother, "Look! I can run multiple applications and switch between
| them!!!", and she gave me a confused look of "what the hell is
| this boy going on about".
| driverdan wrote:
| DESQView was how most of us BBS SysOps ran multiple nodes.
| Being able to multitask DOS programs was amazing at that time.
| EricE wrote:
| Yes, I knew several guys that used DesqView for running multi-
| node BBS's. Before DesqView, it wasn't uncommon for multi-node
| BBS guys to have a Novel server and one PC per modem per phone
| line.
|
| I played with but didn't run it - I was running Maximus on OS/2
| at the time :)
| tptacek wrote:
| Yep! This is me! Both DesqView and DesqView/X --- because I had
| a Renegade BBS with Frontdoor.
| tobinfricke wrote:
| Same! Before switching from DesqView to OS/2. Those were the
| days! :-)
| tptacek wrote:
| I, too, switched to OS/2. And then back. :)
| emag wrote:
| Oh, wow. Blast from the past. Let's see... Opus-CBCS, then
| QuickBBS with FrontDoor, then RemoteAccess with FrontDoor,
| at some point I was convinced to switch to D'Bridge. All
| eventually under DesqView for a few years, then under OS/2
| until I went off to college...
|
| I bet I still have all the floppies I saved everything to
| in my garage. Alas, the SyQuest 88MB removable disk drive
| (in all its SCSI glory) that I eventually ran everything
| off of once that "huge" 20MB Seagate drive filled up bit
| the dust a few years ago.
| pan69 wrote:
| It was bugging me and I had to look it up. I was running
| Frontdoor with RemoteAccess. I have no memory of how it all
| worked though. What I do remember is; making ANSI screens
| with TheDraw and chatting with visitors who were dialing in
| (if I had any). lol.
| fb03 wrote:
| omg you took me down a memory lane with that ANSI editing
| application. TheDraw was awesome and so easy to create and
| use blocks and coloring and whatnot. A must have if you
| wanted to try to do ansi/ascii art and also generate some
| screens for your ghetto local BBS.
|
| thank you!
| tobiasbischoff wrote:
| I was running a 4 line BBS on this back in the days. The
| multitasking abilities where unreal back then. Literally made 4
| PCs running 24/7 into one.
|
| Edit: Nevermind, i was running the older, DOS-based version
| IncRnd wrote:
| I never used DESQview/X, though I knew about it, of course. I
| used DESQview, which was absolutely head and shoulders above
| everything else that was DOS-based. DV turned a single instance
| DOS machine into something far more. It was like I was back in
| University with the ability to swap between multiple terminals.
| Except the main difference was increased speed. It seemed as fast
| as the Cray I had used. It wasn't, of course, but there was no
| delay after I would press enter! I had the entire workstation
| computer to myself. A database job in one tab (foxpro!). A print
| job to a farm of rena printers in another tab (custom mail-
| merge). Ah, those were the days. lol. Back to the modern and more
| interesting problems of 2021 :)
| myself248 wrote:
| I used DesQview for years, and DV/X for a few minutes. It was
| just an unbearable resource-hog and gave no advantages I cared
| about. XEyes was entertaining for a minute, but so what?
|
| DV was everything a UI should be. Incredibly fast and
| responsive. Keyboardable for everything. And it stayed the hell
| out of the way unless you asked it for something. It unlocked
| the potential of the 80386, and finally gave us the
| multitasking we'd been promised for years. Better yet, I could
| use all my same software; it successfully merged my single-
| purpose DOS applications into a multi-purpose environment that
| I could use for every aspect of my daily tasks.
|
| Windows was a sorry joke in comparison. The DOS experience on
| Windows was second-class, and terminal software for Windows was
| never as good or as flexible as Telemate. I only begrudgingly
| installed Windows because it was required to play with all this
| "winsock" software I'd been hearing about, since I had no clue
| how to set up TCP/IP on DOS. (There might've been tutorials in
| places I didn't know to look, but Windows advice was
| everywhere.) And single-session BBSing was rapidly going the
| way of the dodo, so with it went DV.
|
| The irony here is that DV/X would've allowed me to do all the
| things Windows was offering, probably in a better way, if only
| I'd realized that at the time.
|
| More's the pity.
| dbt00 wrote:
| You could definitely do DOS TCP/IP stuff, I had a 286 in my
| dorm room I could telnet with, but it was pretty cranky to
| set up.
| h2odragon wrote:
| KA9QNOS FTW!
|
| http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/
|
| There were other ways too, but i found that code so
| valuable several times
| wvenable wrote:
| I thought I may have been on the only person on the planet
| with a 286 in my dorm room and using the Internet. I used
| an application who's name I can't remember but it had a
| TCP/IP stack and was an email client, news client, and text
| based web browser for real mode DOS. This was around 1995.
| Clubber wrote:
| I used DESQview to run a multi-node BBS back in the day. I
| tried using Windows 3.1 but it was dog slow in comparison.
| randombits0 wrote:
| This is where I used it as well. It was that, PC-MOS, or
| later, OS/2.
|
| So, Wildcat! or PC-Board?
| Clubber wrote:
| WWIV! If you registered they would give you compilable
| source code and I liked being able to customize it. Before
| that it was C-Net on the C64. Modifying BBSes is what got
| me into coding.
| jmspring wrote:
| Was a big WWIV modder. Never really ran a board myself,
| but helped several in the East Bay back in the late
| 80s/early 90s.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| We used PC-MOS/386 to run our DOS software on 386SX
| computers with multiple sessions but it tended to corrupt
| HDD's.
| tssva wrote:
| The source code for PC-MOS/386 version 5.01, the last
| commercial version, was released under the GPL in 2017
| and is available on GitHub.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Thanks - wish we could preserve more software artifacts -
| the Netware source code would be interesting to look at.
| driverdan wrote:
| I ran PCBoard under DESQView on a 486 laptop with an
| external SCSI drive for file storage. Being able to use the
| BBS at the same time as users was amazing the first time I
| did it.
| myself248 wrote:
| Renegade, you heathen! ;)
| a-dub wrote:
| was it renegade or remote access that used to play a
| bleepy rendition of guns n' roses on the pc speaker?
| VectorLock wrote:
| Renegade really was the apex of the BBS era.
| randombits0 wrote:
| Not heathen, just old. Haha!
|
| Edit: my first BBS ran on an Atari 800XL with software
| written by Jeff Minter. Had to hack up a ring detector
| for the lame Atari 1200 baud modem. Lol!
| threeio wrote:
| I remember trying double-dos to do that as well.. DESQview
| was much better at multiline
| DogRunner wrote:
| me too! Running BBS for several lines on one pc was awesome
| at that time.
| sedatk wrote:
| > Just about everything (including resizing and moving windows)
| can be done entirely from a keyboard without ever touching a
| mouse. The mouse works everywhere, but you don't need to take
| your hands off the keyboard if you don't want to.
|
| That's literally how Windows has worked since 1.0. You can still
| resize and move windows without leaving the keyboard. The
| shortcut key is Alt-Space if you're curious.
| Karunamon wrote:
| If you have a retro PC or a quality emulator you can get ahold of
| this and play with it. DOSBox won't cut it since an extended
| memory manager, specifically QEMM, is required and doesn't
| emulate well. Use a full VM or something like PCem.
|
| https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x
| jd3 wrote:
| I first learned about DVX from another HN commenter a few years
| ago -- i was in the middle of an OS pattern archiving project at
| the time, so if you're interested in pantomiming the DVX ui, here
| are the raw xpm/pngs
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045149
|
| http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/OEM/DVX/
| femto113 wrote:
| Ah from the time of great widget wars, when Motif and OPEN LOOK
| were battling for GUI supremacy. I was vehemently team OL (via
| Sun's OpenWindows flavor) and absolutely loathed how bulky the
| borders felt on Motif windows.
| sparcpile wrote:
| Nathan Lineback has an article with more screenshots on his site.
| His review is over 20 years old now.
| http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html
| mbreese wrote:
| I used this for a while. It was a great system for running a
| couple of DOS BBS instances (on two lines![1]) in the background
| while also running Windows 3.1.
|
| Although, I can't imagine that this use-case was all that
| popular. It was a great glimpse of what was possible on the
| hardware of the day, but still seemed like more of a gimmick. But
| given that we run everything on virtual servers these days, it
| was really ahead of its time.
|
| [1] PCBoard, if you want to know. Writing door programs in the
| PCBoard language was my first real taste of programming.
| tlack wrote:
| I loved the PPE modding system. I wish I could find my old
| PCBoard software!
| pridkett wrote:
| Like many people in this thread, I used DESQview for BBSes and
| later DESQview/X, but there wasn't much graphical that I could
| find for it. Eventually I moved to OS/2 because it was easier to
| program, but it still holds a fond place in my heart. I just wish
| I would've realized the real power of X back when I was on
| DESQview/X, not that it would've mattered with only one PC in the
| house.
|
| A decade later when I got to CMU for grad school I was talking to
| a professor when I saw he was using DESQview/X as his desktop
| OS...in 2004.
|
| I thought that was wild until I met a cluster of folks at IBM
| Research still running OS/2 in 2012 when my office got moved to
| Yorktown Heights.
|
| Such pleasant memories...but I think I'll stick with modern
| desktop environments.
| spullara wrote:
| I was working at a small manufacturing company in Tennessee over
| my summer break from college in I think 1992 and they had decided
| to buy DESQview because it looked cool. It really was amazing
| multitasking our netware apps on it.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Surely there's a technical visionary behind this. I wonder who
| and what the story was of its creation?
| kloch wrote:
| DESQview/X was amazing and fun.
|
| > it would be quite nice to be able to run DESQview using newer
| graphics cards (read: higher resolution)
|
| This was by far it's biggest limitation. At the time interest in
| higher than SVGA resolution was just beginning. Support for the
| latest high resolution cards/modes was limited (though I think
| later versions had generic VESA driver support which helped
| somewhat. Don't forget your monitor also had to support higher
| resolutions and large high resolution monitors were very
| expensive.
| vzaliva wrote:
| I remember running long compilations (~1hr) under DESQview while
| doing some editing or even playing siple DOS games in parallel.
| It was amazin. DESQview/X never caught up with me or anyone I
| knew.
| canadian_tired wrote:
| Oh wow. I fondly remember DesqView (no /X) and being completely
| amazed. I think around that time the larger buzz was around SCO
| Unix.
| pavlov wrote:
| The article trips into the age-old trap of X11's client/server
| terminology being the opposite of expectations.
|
| In X, the server is the graphical terminal (i.e. your computer)
| and the client is the remote computer executing the program. The
| idea is that display and UI devices are the static resources
| being served to any number of programs.
| dmead wrote:
| I came here to say this. either the author was confused by the
| features or they chose to reverse it to make it easier to
| understand.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I remember it from Dr Dobbs ads, never got to use it though.
| agumonkey wrote:
| just ran into that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_lfpdK7bQM
|
| 'DESQView/X 2.1 (x86) Motif running under VirtualBox'
| h2odragon wrote:
| I had a DesqView/X Tshirt for the longest time; wore it to
| several shows and only had one person recognize it.
|
| I got it at the COMDEX Chicago show where they were doing their
| first demos (nothing for sale today, sorry) and the GEOS booth
| got kidnapped by the AOL team for their deal. Nearly had to
| tackle the guy for it but I just knew that this was a "damn that
| shoulda worked" doomed product right then.
|
| Edit: As I recall, they were far more interested in playing with
| their R/C blimp that morning than in talking to customers. I had
| a spiel all wound up about "I can put copies of your software in
| $X offices this month, if it works for our app: gimme a demo
| copy" but never got to deliver it.
| mikestew wrote:
| I have that t-shirt, because I was at that COMDEX! (I'd say
| that such an admission dates me, but admitting to having _ever_
| attended a COMDEX is going to date you.)
|
| It is disappointing about the booth personnel's lack of
| interest, but you did at least milk a blimp out of them, right?
| IIRC, we had about as much engagement when we talked to them,
| but at least we got swag (granted, the "R" in "R/C" stood for
| "wired remote", not "radio"). Stopped at McDonald's on the way
| home to Indianapolis to fill it with helium. Played with it for
| a month, then lost interest, like most swag. Still, probably
| the best swag we've received.
|
| I used DESQview for years, but the /X was doomed to fall under
| the wheels of the Windows 95 marketing machine, or just the MS
| marketing machine in general. Even I didn't use it all that
| much, having moved on to OS/2 Warp when it came out.
| dang wrote:
| Wow, looks like this has never had an HN thread before. One
| interesting submission (https://archive.org/details/desqview-x-
| booklet) but no comments:
|
| _DesqView /X: A Technical Perspective [book]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061438 - Jan 2014 (0
| comments)
| wk_end wrote:
| Sounds amazing. Why wasn't it a success? Was performance bad on
| the systems of the time? Priced too high? Lack of marketing
| muscle?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Personally I think that it was just too awesome for most people
| to appreciate due to stupidity and lack of knowledge.
|
| Being able to run X Windows programs an DOS and Windows 3 is
| amazing. I am sure there are lots of ways it could have been
| taken advantage of. The majority of potential customers were
| just too dumb though.
|
| There doesn't always need to be a good reason for something to
| be unpopular. Sometimes, it's just because the flock of sheep
| were going in a different direction. Maybe they were going that
| way because the shepard got a bribe.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| There's some information on Wikipedia about the company's
| decline:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#Decline_of_DESQview
| narrator wrote:
| Seems like the pre-Linux trend of nickel and diming for
| everything, especially tcp/ip network connectivity
| contributed heavily to the failure of the platform.
| bboreham wrote:
| No application software. Went up against Windows 3.
| a-dub wrote:
| pc market also didn't have much use for X11 then either. i
| think this even predated xfree86.
|
| would be curious if it actually would work with remote x
| clients on the unix machines of the time. (assuming they had
| complete X11 implementations)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Likely few potential customers really needed the features it
| offered. X11 support only made sense if you had Unix around
| already, and if that was the case, you were probably investing
| in Unix workstations anyways?
|
| The workstation market was hot around then. Even Atari and
| Commodore tried to bring out lower end 68020 & 68030 Unix
| workstations. Until Windows 95 and NT rolled out it seemed like
| maybe the future belonged to Unix. But that didn't pan out,
| really, not til later anyways.
|
| Re: price $275 in 1992, it seems:
| https://techmonitor.ai/techonology/quarterdecks_desqviewx_du...
|
| So not cheap, but not insanely priced.
|
| But in 1993 I was also installing Linux for free on my 486. And
| I even had a working X11 environment.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| $275 was much, _much_ cheaper than a Unix workstation. Linux
| with X was only a year away, though, and that put a nail in
| the coffin of DV /X as cheap-PC-as-X-server.
|
| Universities in the early 90s had networked X services
| _everywhere_.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Universities in the early 90s had networked X services
| everywhere._
|
| I was definitely born a little bit too late. I started
| university in the very-late 90s, and nearly all the
| "public" (as in, open to all students) computer labs ran
| Windows NT (and later Win2k). (At least they were set up
| with networked home directories, so students could easily
| access saved coursework wherever they were.)
|
| But there was one lab in particular that I enjoyed, though:
| one of my professors had a computer lab that he had de-
| facto control over, and all the machines ran FreeBSD (his
| one true OS love). I would ssh back into my dorm-room
| computer (running Red Hat, I think?), so I could run my
| personal X11 apps on the X server on the FreeBSD box I was
| using. Unfortunately I only had access to that lab for a
| few semesters, as access was granted only while taking some
| particular classes. Those machines had a bunch of hardware
| design simulators and Verilog & VHDL compilers on them; it
| was mainly an ECE hardware design lab.
| sliken wrote:
| Being compatible with everything (X11, dos, and windows) meant
| zero native apps. Microsoft tried with Windows for Workgroups,
| but eventually got better at networking and multitasking and
| most importantly had many native apps.
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(page generated 2021-11-30 23:00 UTC)