Hacker News Reader

Comment by curlypaul924 | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I first learned about multitasking. I think I read an article in Compute! or PC Magazine about Desqview or Concurrent DOS, and I remember wondering "Who would ever want to run two programs at the same time? Nobody has a multitasking brain!"

View on HN

Desqview was acceptable to run a two-line Dial-up BBS on the same machine. It had stability issues beyond that so when the need arose for a third line we moved to OS/2 which was wonderful to multitask DOS applications in. The internet killed our little BBS before we had a need for four lines and beyond :)

There was a cottage industry of software to get around DOS' single-tasking limitations. DoubleDOS was another program that let you have multiple sessions. There were terminate and stay resident (TSR) program like Sidekick.

I always thought that TSR stood for "trash system randomly".

I'll show myself out.

Yep and then you get the 2000's brain that can't focus on a thing for more than a few minutes at a time.

Meanwhile I was clamoring to find a copy of DesqView as fast as I could, because my favorite MOD player had a DOS shell, but you had to exit your shelled-out program to return to the player and pick another song.

That was acceptable for a quick dial-up-and-toss-a-mail-packet session, but not for door games or chat, so the prospect of being able to run something in an _alternate_ task, not a _parent_ task, was incredibly attractive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com