DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future | Hacker News Reader

DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future

lunduke.substack.com

505 pointsWoodenChair183 comments

This was a wonderful surprise. DESQview (and anything early Quarterdeck) holds a special place in my heart.

My uncle, Gary Pope, co-founded the company. I grew up with DESQview and QEMM as two of our primary pieces of software running on our computers.

I moved onto Linux many years later, and used to have a Linux box as my primary machine, but with a DOS computer sitting next to it, DESQview/X loaded up, and would use DESQview/X as a makeshift second monitor by using it as an X11 display server.

DESQview/X was based on X11R5, I believe, rather than X11R6, so I was a bit limited in terms of which software worked, but terminals were just fine.

Anyway...

A while back, I assembled all the DESQview/Quarterdeck material I had sitting around and put it up for others to look at. There's some stuff in here that you won't find anywhere else:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/htvf2edf3mrx0be/AABllqVhf0BzOytup...

There's a README with some background, screenshots, marketing material, photos, product reviews, and even a paper that my mom wrote up about DESQ (the precursor to DESQview and DESQview/X), with a little bit of background on its development, back in 1984.

Hope it proves interesting! :)

Could you ask your uncle to pull some strings and opensource it?

There are no strings to pull.

The company was sold to Symantec back in the late 90s, I believe, and he retired (for the most part). At that point, he no longer had the source code. Symantec eventually closed it down. Given the state of things like version control back then, I would be surprised if anybody has that source.

If I thought I could get it, I'd have asked for it loooong ago :)

Thanks for trying. You're a hero of open source.

amusingly, it looks like it actually was proposed 20 years ago, but now all the links are dead : /

https://slashdot.org/story/02/01/27/1950244/desqviewx-night-...

That's a shame :/

Looks like I commented on that thread way back then. And I think my comment there was at least mostly correct. I was always under the impression that much of the core of the product, the interesting bits, was done in assembly, or a layer on top of assembly (they used something called SYMPL in the DESQ and DESQview eras, but I'm not sure about DESQview/X). This would have been for performance and memory constraints.

I'll have to call and get clarification on all that. I might be mistaken.

In the later years, Quarterdeck transitioned to building DOS and Windows applications like CleanSweep. That was the era when Symantec bought them. I always got the impression that DESQview wasn't really an interest of theirs. It would be interesting to know what they would have done with the source in that era.

LOL cheers to continuity.

device=qemm.sys

next up: xtree!

That's a shame - like so many other closed source systems, acquisitions followed by sun-setting and all that hard (and smart) work eventually gone!

It's impressive that this software is long deceased and still people hold it dear - that's QUALITY, hard to find in today's world of half-baked, half-finished things designed to fail as soon as they're out of warranty.

On the technical side I wonder how the pre-emptive multi-tasking was realised without a MMU, i.e. pre-386? I heard QMX also had that, but it seems tricky to provide that in a stable manner without memory protection.

Preemptive multitasking is easy; you just hook the timer interrupt and switch stacks in the interrupt handler. The only tricky part is ensuring that your task queues are modified in such a way that an interrupt at the wrong time can't crash the system.

But it's true that, without memory protection, a bug in one program can corrupt all the other programs, too. The 286 did have memory protection, FWIW, and arguably an on-chip MMU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286#Protected_mode https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7683/how-... http://www.rcollins.org/articles/pmbasics/tspec_a1_doc.html

EUMEL and Oberon handled this by implementing memory protection in the compiler, but obviously that doesn't help with existing MS-DOS applications unless your compiler's source language is 8086 machine code. That's more or less the approach VMWare and QEMU used to virtualize non-virtualizable hardware. Not sure about Soft-ICE.

Also, btw, the 80386 came out in 01985, and DESQview/X came out 7 years later, in 01992.

Thanks for sharing it.

Hey, instead of Dropbox - would you consider putting this on archive.org?

I plan to, but I want to run it by my family before I commit to a permanent record on archive.org. They're fine with sharing when it comes up, but, you know, due diligence.

Understood - thanks!

Thanks for understanding :)

It's on my task list for the holidays.

Is it done yet? ;-)

Wow, thanks for putting it up - I was always curious about the world of QEMM software but missed it at the time.

There is some ongoing work to get this working in DOSEMU2.

Would you consider asking your family if they would be up for opening the source code for Desqview/X ?

The source code, along with all other assets, were sold to Symantec in the late 90s. My uncle doesn’t have any copies of it, and so much time has passed that there aren’t any contacts at Symantec to ask (if Symantec even preserved the source to begin with — they didn’t buy the company for DESQview).

Early in my career, I did work with a former employee of my uncle’s, who worked on DESQview/X back in the day, and we spoke a lot about that time. If he had the source stashed away someplace, he never admitted it.

I wish I could offer more hope than that. I want it too :/

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)

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".

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 :)

I ran a BBS using DESQview on an 80286 with a Rampage memory card. It connected nightly to the Fido BBS "Southern Star". Very cool stuff for the time.

DESQview was a huge help maintaining the board while it was actually running, and especially for the nightly tasks.

edit: I should add, the BBS software was Maximus.

Yep! This is me! Both DesqView and DesqView/X --- because I had a Renegade BBS with Frontdoor.

Same! Before switching from DesqView to OS/2. Those were the days! :-)

I, too, switched to OS/2. And then back. :)

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.

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.

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!

What was the name of your BBS? What was your handle? I know of you as the security guy from Enteract, but didn't know you were in the BBS scene!

I keep pretty quiet about this out of embarrassment (there's stuff from me from when I was like 14 still hiding on the Internet --- I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`) but if you email me, happy to share. I was an H/P/A/V board scene person. If you knew NBFC or Whammy Bar, you knew my Chicago social scene; if you knew UPT, my actual interests. My silly Chicago BBS was kitted out to look like a Gandalf X.25 router.

I've got much the same thing re: the "old days". My friends and I wrote a mess of (bad, but for the most part intentionally bad) text files that have mostly disappeared.

UPT! No kidding. That's a blast from the past. Sadly, I only remember a few particular people from that time. I got to meet just a few of them IRL. I was slightly too young to go to the various 'cons, etc, before the Internet came storming-in and killed the BBS scene.

I left home right after high school (not in a bad way!) and wound up going to basically every hacker conference for the next couple years, and a side effect of that is that a lot of those people are still personal friends today. There are good stories about where a lot of those people --- especially the UPT people --- ended up, but a lot of them are skittish about having those connections made and I never know which of them are or aren't sensitive.

We all thought we were pretty cool, but of course, there was an even sub-er subculture that was doing the UPT thing but on BBSs set up on X.25 networks; that's how you get to, for instance, the 8lgm people.

I can understand being skittish about it. We had to have crossed paths back then (though probably not IRL-- I went to a couple of the early DefCon's but that was it). I've mostly lost touch with everybody from "the scene", sadly.

There was a conversation on HN a couple of years ago where somebody posted a particular old X.25 NUA (ending in "..0177") that brought back a flood of memories. There was quite a thrill in "exploring" back then (wardialing, scanning the X.25 networks, messing with voicemail systems, etc). I never did get into that SCO Unix box that purported to be in a local Taco Bell... >smile<

All my childhood embarrassment was on Usenet. Then Google grabbed up all those old Usenet archives and there I was...

I lost all parental credibility the day my kid learned that I used to use "Black Rose" as a BBS alias back in the 90s.

>I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`

You should post a link!

Every once in a while when I'm using a common unix command, I find myself randomly re-encountering the frame of mind that I was in, the world outlook I had, and the sense of amazement I experienced when I first learned it as a kid. A sudden and explicable feeling awe at the breathtaking pervasive power of "cat" or "ls" or "echo" and how they fit together, and the very idea of a shell with commands and files and directories that you could name, look at, change, and move around. Remembering the excitement of discovering and fitting a new important puzzle piece into the growing model of what I was learning.

For me, it was like, I know how to write a DOS batch file, and here's Unix, you can do some of the same things.

I was smarter as an 18 year old than I am now, though! That's a thing my IRC friends from the time constantly talk about today; the people we were when we were shouting each other out in 1990s Phrack issues seem a lot sharper than we are now. We used to hang out and build "protected mode program loaders" for fun. You know, operating systems.

I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it.

Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.

Same here. I also ran a local H/P/A/V board (mostly H/P, really) back in the early 90's. I wrote several text files, and collected/distributed 1000's more of them. Fun times.

DESQView was how most of us BBS SysOps ran multiple nodes. Being able to multitask DOS programs was amazing at that time.

I could always tell when a BBS was running under DesqView, because it was often soooo slooow. The cool kids ran OS/2! And the really, really cool kids had Amigas (I was never clear if these were multitasking or not, but many Amiga BBS's had multi node so I assume so)

Yes, AmigaOS was built around a multi-tasking kernel. It was a pretty advanced OS for its day.

There was clip shared on HN with Gary Jones in it showing a seven node cluster of Amiga2k used for rocket science at NASA. Very impressive.

Yay, I'm finally a cool kid :)

I did indeed run a BBS on OS/2 and played X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter while people were dialing in without a hitch.

At least that's how I want to remember it. Surprisingly I never tried DesqView but it looks great!

I ran both DesqView and DesqView/X and I never saw any performance degradation while running DOS apps. If you ran Windows under it, it would suffer because of the poor (at the time, non-preemptive) scheduler. Windows was/is by its own definition, an "ill behaved" application.

Preemptive multitasking, with no memory protection.

I think they leveraged this to do stuff like update the appearance of buttons on click in the higher priority event process (and then send an event), to give a more responsive feel to the UI.

I also remember Mosaic once had a use after free bug on graphics contexts and would occasionally render a web page in another window.

At least by the time of the 386/486 era, I never noticed any difference. I did notice a big difference with BBSes that were multitasking dos apps using Windows 3.1. The multitasking on Windows was very jerky.

OS/2 had great multitasking, but I remember its driver support being limited for multiport serial boards. I had an Arnet Smartport 8 and couldn't move from DesqView to OS/2 because there was no support for it.

Wow, the slowness of Desqview BBSes is something I haven't thought about for 30 years, but yes, you are right. I remember calling into a Roboboard-based BBS that switched to Desqview and seeing the characters type out so slowly on my screen. I think the SysOp quickly moved away from it.

I ended up running OS/2 Warp when it came time to run my own BBS. :)

OS/2 was such a game changer for me. I used that until Linux in college. In a weird twist of fate I worked at Microsoft and moved on to Windows 2000 in the late 90s. Never did run XP or 98!

DesqView, at least in its earlier incarnations, ran fine (if slow) even on an 8088. Eventually they moved to /386 and /X. It's kind of a shame that the /X version didn't gain traction, but by then there were other options ranging from Linux to OS/2 to Windows 95.

There was another oddball multitasking OS out there from the late 1980s as well: VM/386. It was originally developed by Softguard (better known for floppy-disk copy protection schemes) and then sold to and launched by IGC. It used the 386's virtual 8086 mode to run virtual machines, a far predecessor to VT-x and AMD-V. I never saw it in action, though. It ran separate DOS instances in each VM, but the 386 only supported real-mode VMs.

Yeah I had an IBM 5150 PC with DESQview and it was kind of amazing to be able to keep a vt-100 emulator dialed into school or a BBS while being able to run a local editor and even compiler. Sounds trivial today but it was a big deal on that old hardware.

Same here, was a must for BBSs

> I remember running DesqView ... it must have been on a 286 (is that possible?), I

Yes.

In fact, I once ran it on an original 4.77MHz 8088. Just as an experiment, I ran two copies of BASICA in two separate windows. The two interpreters ran in parallel, and thanks to DesqView's lack of memory protection, it was possible to send data from one to the other via a simple form of shared memory IPC. (DEF SEG to pick a common memory segment between the two, and POKE/PEEK to send/receive data.)

The trouble with the 8088/286 class machines was really the lack of memory to run multiple applications and the fact that most serious DOS code assumed direct hardware access. Both of these made useful multitasking difficult. DesqView/386 fixed this by using QEMM to run the 386 in protected mode. This gave access to much more memory (if you could afford it), as well as memory protection and V86 multitasking. Fixed most of the significant issues with smaller systems.

While it might not have been comfortable I had two users separately logged in to a V30 machine (8086 clone) back in the day, one over serial console. That was with Minix 1.5. OS-9 on a CoCo could do a similar trick on even more limited hardware (6809 processor). The problem was with DOS's design.

(Video of someone doing two users on a CoCo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deBPEPPIdwk)

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.

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.

I did not get a blimp. The dude i was with snaffled that; he'd got the tickets through some friend of his, so fair enough.

I'd love to see that tshirt

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.

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.

Not saying you are wrong, but I’ve never referred to it like that. If my linux desktop is running an application that I’m seeing through an X client on my laptop, then my laptop is the client, and the desktop is the server.

At the level of the hardware that’s fine, but in X Windows software architecture terminology the X Server is the user application presenting the UI.

It’s not technically accurate to say that this or that computer is the server or client, the X architecture isn’t about hardware, it’s about software components. You often run both the X server and several X client applications on the same box for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Software_archi...

Nope. In X, your monitor is the server. In your example, the laptop is the X server, and the desktop is the X client. HOWEVER, and probably what trips people up, is that the desktop is your COMPUTE server. But the laptop is the PIXEL SERVER.

I mean, sure, you can call your laptop the client all day long, but in X windows terminology the laptop is the X server. So you'd be wrong. :-)

The application is the client. It calls connect() to reach the display server.

Even Windows and Mac have a concept of a display server which is pretty closely the same. Yet people don't seem to criticize that?

Technically, the client is the program executing on the remote computer, not the remote computer itself.

I mostly find it confusing that people find X11 client / server technology confusing The client is the one asking for updates on the screen, the server is the one updating the screen. OK, in X11 the server is the think closest to the user, maybe that's what's so confusing?

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 :)

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.

This is where I used it as well. It was that, PC-MOS, or later, OS/2.

So, Wildcat! or PC-Board?

Renegade, you heathen! ;)

was it renegade or remote access that used to play a bleepy rendition of guns n' roses on the pc speaker?

RemoteAccess used that as the default Sysop page tune. It could be replaced, though.

Renegade really was the apex of the BBS era.

BBS software was very regional and scene specific. A lot of Midwestern Warez guys loved Renegade, and Cott Lang hated that! The really cool warez guys ran PC Board (for some reason), or a Fourm hack which looked cool but seemed buggy.

I think Renegade's non-warez scene competition was TAG, WWIV, Wildcat and (of course) Telegard. I kind of liked all of them for various reasons!

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!

We used PC-MOS/386 to run our DOS software on 386SX computers with multiple sessions but it tended to corrupt HDD's.

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.

Thanks - wish we could preserve more software artifacts - the Netware source code would be interesting to look at.

I stole a 256 user version license from a training machine during training, it’s all in command.com. I never used it, it was just a trophy.

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.

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.

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.

I remember trying double-dos to do that as well.. DESQview was much better at multiline

me too! Running BBS for several lines on one pc was awesome at that time.

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.

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.

KA9QNOS FTW!

http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/

There were other ways too, but i found that code so valuable several times

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.

You're not the only one. Minuet was what I used.

Yes that was it! I knew if I heard the name, I'd remember.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Internet_Users_Essen...

Setting up TCP/IP on DOS required either going via the Novell Netware route, which eventually supported it alongside their own protocol, install the drivers that came with the network card, or by the time Windows for Workgroups came it was supported on the box with WinSock, hence the "for Workgroups".

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

> This is the DESQview/X File Manager. It's not very friendly (no drag-and-drop and double-clicking an executable opens it in a hex viewer instead of running it) but it has enough functionality to be usable.

hex viewer :-)

> 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.

Starting with Windows 8 and progressing into Windows 11, this has become less and less true. Clicking the top left no longer opens the window menu, double clicking the icon no longer closes the application.

Old keyboard shortcuts stop working as applications implement their own UI controls through Electron and similar systems. Keyboard shortcuts work inconsistently or completely because the developers of the necessary UI frameworks don't know or don't care about them, Microsoft itself included.

The legacy systems and functionality of windows are being removed as programs are turned into apps. I think that's a real shame.

> Clicking the top left no longer opens the window menu, double clicking the icon no longer closes the application.

> Old keyboard shortcuts stop working as applications implement their own UI controls through Electron

How are these related to the keyboard support in the OS?

> Microsoft itself included

Can you give an example where Microsoft stopped caring about keyboard shortcuts?

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.

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.

Quarterdeck really had some dope stuff those days, they were great. Sorry your investment didnt pan out!

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

PCem has been all but abandoned, try 86Box instead. https://86box.net

Sounds amazing. Why wasn’t it a success? Was performance bad on the systems of the time? Priced too high? Lack of marketing muscle?

There's some information on Wikipedia about the company's decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#Decline_of_DESQview

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.

No application software. Went up against Windows 3.

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)

It did, xfree86 was a Linux thing.

I worked on X11 applications from 1988 to 1992, including Lotus 123 for Motif. Every Unix machine of the day had a complete X11, it was the big thing.

The PC market had X servers like Exceed, but in 1990 it was uncommon for a PC to have enough RAM to run DOS, a TCP stack and X11. Also the TCP stack was $400 per seat.

As PCs got more powerful, Windows 3 fitted most people’s needs much better, and came with Solitaire.

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.

$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.

> 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.

"Universities in the early 90s had networked X services everywhere."

Some universities did. Mine had computer labs with non-networked PC's running DOS and a single machine with a printer attached that you lined up for so you could take your turn to print. But to be fair it was a liberal arts school with no computer sciences or engineering program.

More than a year! Linux with X took quite a few years to become usable, even if you had someone that knew how to install it from twenty floppies. I remember spending a week getting X running in the mid-90s.

$275 misses the big investment in hardware over just DOS or even Win3. Other folks have mentioned the investments in CPU, RAM, and Graphics that would need to be made to be productive, and these were all expensive then. I'd guess you'd be looking at $1000+ which is about $2000+ today.

Most businesses didn't absolutely need it, and worse was better unfortunately.

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.

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.

Display device driver support wasn't that great.

There were a few issues:

1) Running X and DOS applications was an interesting concept in a world (i.e. x86 PCs) where no standard GUI had yet dominated. The concept that Quarterdeck was likely banking on was that DOS apps would continue to be the standard on the PC with more 'enterprisey' applications running on big iron Unix systems for corporations/government/education. Unfortunately for Quarterdeck, this didn't happen the way they thought/hoped it would as X never really got traction beyond the workstation market until Linux took off. As we all know now, the way most users ended up interacting with Unix/Linux systems is via a web browser... no X required.

2) This was right around the time Windows was starting to take off. While Windows didn't do nearly as good a job at multitasking DOS applications (i.e. it didn't provide them as much conventional memory and the task switching was quite chunky) it provided enough of a stop-gap solution while Microsoft pushed what would become MS Office hard. So within about a year of it being released, the question was transitioning from 'will it run my DOS applications' to 'will it run my Windows applications' for many. On the X side, by 1994 Linux had both X (client and server) support and a networking stack, performed better and was free. So both sides of the value proposition (multitasking DOS apps and being an X server) were rendered moot.

3) Unlike other desktop OS's, DESQView/X didn't have many 'native' applications since very little software was ever ported to run client-side. So for the majority of users who didn't need to run X applications across a network, it was really just a DOS multitasker with a nice (for its time) GUI.

The thing about DESQview is that, by 1995, running Linux with X as a desktop OS was viable. So, for people who wanted X, they could get it as a native client in Linux for free. Linux also had pretty good support for Windows applications via Wine.

It’s the same position Coherent was in; sure, it was cool technology at the time, but Linux was also available and was underselling the competition. The only PC OS anyone was paying money for in 1995 was Windows 95 or Windows NT; Windows 95 had killed OS/2 Warp at this point, and proprietary UNIX and UNIX-like stuff on PCs was already being edged out by Linux.

If you wanted to be able to multitask DOS and Linux at the same time though... I wonder how DESQview/X emulation capabilities and support for showing them in X windows compares to Linux Dosemu of the era.

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.

I loved the PPE modding system. I wish I could find my old PCBoard software!

I've written about this software in the past, but I was a former user for quite some time.

Back in the day I ran a multi-node BBS and like the vast majority of BBSes in my area, they were all DOS-based applications[0]. I had written my own BBS software, originally a Telegard 2.4(3?) hack.

It was basically impossible to get a multi-node system working purely with DOS/Windows[1]. The (few useless) options for multi-tasking were nearly non-functional and this became monumentally worse when I had re-written the library which put text on the screen with some fancy assembly language that made everything positively fly on my 80486.

Enter Desqview/X -- for the DOS era, it was crazy. It just worked. Very few things other than the simplest in DOS "just worked". Aside from the odd interface (which wasn't all that much more odd than Windows 3.x) it performed exceptionally well, managing three active nodes without choking. Meanwhile, dear old Dad could fire up Lotus 1-2-3 while the BBS was running and didn't have to take the whole setup down[2].

[0] Telegard (later Renegade) and T.A.G. were the most common in my area code. I ran custom software that I wrote.

[1] Not entirely true, I know before I ran Desqview/X I was doing something else to make everything work, but it fell apart when I altered the software to improve screen writing performance.

[2] My dad was a small business owner who did his and the businesses taxes, himself. So February~AprilI had to figure what to do with my time since the computer was occupied during most non-school hours by my dad.

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.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

>X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly.

I couldn't stop laughing/crying reading this trip into high school and college. As a kid I thought I was the dense fool who couldn't make sense of X. Nope, it just sucked. Thanks for keeping this history alive :)

As a matter of fact, the mess with widgets and X APIs was the turning point for me where I started to understand why these suits spent so much damn $$$ on Win32

On the contrary, I'd found Motif's 3D look so elegant and cool that I'd even incorporated it in my DOS-based GUI library. This is a BlueWave/QWK reader I'd written with it: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine

Your widgets look like they have a 1px 3D border? The Motif that I remember was much bulkier, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg

They both look very close in terms of pixel widths, though the Motif screenshot is much higher resolution so there they actually look thinner to me.

The window borders are 5px, vs. Motif's 6px (in your screenshot). The Motif button borders are actually thinner (2px vs. 3px). The Motif frames around lists are thicker (2px vs. 1px).

Probably. I couldn’t afford long draw times (it ran on 386SX-25Mhz), so I usually opted for 1px for everything. The resolution was lower too (640x480) leaving less space for for decoration.

Epiphany: imagine one of those old, small but thick notebooks. Install FreeDOS on it, hide a small ARM SBC inside it. Connect both machines through network and run an X server on FreeDOS.

Instant, retro style, modern guts UNIX laptop.

As someone who ran a BBS for an extended period of time, DESQview (and obviously QEMM) was an essential part of daily life.

It allowed for a lot of things that you'd take for granted today-- like logging into an additional local-only node in the background to reply to messages, or doing file management while you had users online.

Hell, even load up some less-intensive games in the foreground and carefully set up DV's preemptive levels to minimize the slowdown to the BBS.

We started with QuickBBS but migrated to RemoteAccess later when QBBS went through a major stall and never recovered. As far as I understand, QuickBBS suffered from a major problem with leadership/ownership-- I don't remember specifics but I do remember that there was maybe one or two releases after that got cleared up but QBBS had already died off by that point. Since RemoteAccess was nearly 1:1 compatible and still getting upgraded, the decision was pretty obvious.

I remember this! Reminds me of the days when M$ had such a monopolistic stranglehold on everything -- would not allow something incredible like this make it. People forget just how anticompetitive Gates was.

I still remember arguing w someone who said "preemptive multitasking was something the average user will never want." <sigh>

Well this brings back memories. I ran a Wildcat BBS under DesqView on a 286! Good times. I really miss Fidonet. The whole online experience, even at 300 baud, was so much more entertaining and educational when everyone there mostly had to build a system, hide your nerdy hobby from the cool kids and be able to use a CLI.

You can access fido thru syncro.net with some bbs+qwk tool or via nntp.

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.

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.

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.

I bought a copy because in theory it would allow running AutoCad while multitasking. I kind of got it to work with more late nights than it was worth…a lot of that due to a complete ignorance of X.

Running a disk defragmenter and a GW-BASIC number crunching script in parallel under DESQview taught me lots of things, e.g. repairing data from what'd been the FAT16 HDD partition before.

Since the fine article is not solely about running a BBS, I will throw in an anecdote about using Windows 3.0 for multitasking.

My colleagues and I had 1 MiB 386 DOS machines for writing and cross-assembling Z80 software. I was inspired by a shoot-out article in one of the PC magazines that compared DesqView, Windows 3.0, and TopView. Apparently it wasn't widely known in 1990 that Windows 3.0 DOS boxes were preemptively multitasked in 386 enhanced mode, with one of those DOS boxes being used for Win16. (This is a fair but radically simplified description of Windows 3.0) The author of the shoot-out pointed out that you could multitask DOS programs this way. So I got approval to install an additional 4 MiB of RAM and Windows 3.0 on my system. Once I got that booted up I started a program build in one DOS box and the text mode source editor in another. I had never had the chance to multitask in this way before, so I stared at the source code, trying to decide what to do. Until the makefile automatically tried to load the binary into the Z80 debugger. The PC locked up.

Since my assumption had been that this method would work out of the box, it was clear that it wasn't time yet for this. I did enough to conclude that the serial port code in the host code of the Z80 debugger was the issue, but not enough to figure out exactly where the bug was.

DesqView and TopView would have been equal to Windows at doing what I was trying to do, but I think Windows was close to the same cost and also had some other potential benefits.

I used my enhanced machine to enhance some tools that benefited from having "lots" of RAM, and gradually my colleagues added the RAM and ran those tools and modified others, and that was the direction the experiment went until I moved on to another company.

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?

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.

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.

By 1992, 1993 most machines were shipping with around 4MB. The 486DX/50 I got (I believe fall 93) was an 8MB machine.

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)

Several important DOS applications (spreadsheets, databases, CAD etc... even Doom required 4 Meg) were absolutely able to use more than 640k which was why you saw PCs with more memory: there were applications people cared about that needed it then. Granted, it was a painful business that had all sorts of limitations but the use cases were there. Anyone paying attention could look around and see that this problem had already been solved in better ways on other platforms and the various DOS multitaskers were just stop-gaps until a more universal solution (both OS and application) came along.

True, and I think Quarterdeck (and Pharlap, Rational, etc.) developed the VCPI specification that allowed those DOS extenders to work cooperatively. Some of the early DOS extenders took over the entire machine and did not allow that.

I remember telling the boss that Windows 95 really required 8MB of RAM, it was unusable at 4MB. Though MS supported it, it swapped like crazy. Most of our PCs didn't have 8 and would need to be upgraded.

Around that time I found a PC running NT in a lab with 20MB in it (cobbled together from two PCs) and thought it was astounding.

It required a 386sx or better with 4MB of RAM, and EGA or better graphics card.

This is quite reasonable for 1992, and the extra ram was likely needed only for the graphics. DESQView itself could run on an 8088 system and didn't even require EMS (although if you did have an EMS board, and configured the system so that the EMS board backfilled the latter 512K, it could multitask much larger programs at the same time as that enabled it to swap entire programs in/out of lower address space instantly).

I've been a low-level 8088 coding hobbyist for many years, and DESQView is still incredibly impressive to me, especially since I know what it has to do under the hood to work and be stable.

I remember it well, never used it but did use DESQview. I thought Microsoft put in a serious offer for QuarterDeck(?), but the owners declined. Probaly due to DESQview/X.

So that is when MS started on Windows 95. I thought not accepting the offer was a mistake, curious what would have happened if they did sell out.

They would have made some money, and the rest of us would have access to a professional OS ~five years earlier! I remember wanting to throw a monitor though a window for several years in the late 90s. I had access to OS/2 and Linux as well, but many apps ran only on Windows.

(Assuming it used a lot less resources than NT, Win 2000 didn't arrive until 2000ish, XP 2001ish.)

I remember it from Dr Dobbs ads, never got to use it though.

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.

It looks like GeOS from GeoWorks.

https://tedium.co/2019/06/20/geoworks-geos-history/

Geos also has quite an interesting history behind it.

In Portugal it was mostly bundled with Phillips PCs.

That is because GeOS tried to look like MOTIF. The linked article even says so.

But... IIRC that was just the default look/theme, and you could switch between a hand full of (only) slightly different ones.

What seems sad to me is it's not nearly easy nor popular to make and use themes which would style modern OSes to look exactly (or very close to) the OSes of the past. Once Windows XP arrived with its "visual styles" theming technology I thought the world will never be the same - everyone will be able to have their windows and controls looking whatever they like, just a matter of a mouse click (and a couple of bucks perhaps). In the reality, though, high quality themes (for any OS) seem weirdly scarce and making your own seems prohibitively hard.

I was a huge Desqview fan, and I tried Desqview/X but didn't stick with it.

In the 80's I built a multi-line electronic claims submission host for a local insurance company that ran the same app 4 times under Desqview (not X). Each app talked to different port of a 4-port serial card, each port hooked to a 2400 baud modem. I had to write an ISR in assembly to handle the incoming serial data because the drivers for the serial card couldn't do the job, but other than that, the Desqview APIs were all I needed.

One of my dorm-mates had this at college. It was a really good choice for them, since they used the university's Unix servers a lot, but they also played a lot of DOOM. It seemed to multitask DOS software about as well as OS/2, which is to say, much better than Windows 3.1, and somewhat better than Windows 95. I probably would have used it if I hadn't already adopted OS/2 at that point.

Don't know why the author calls it an OS, then acknowledges in the article it's not an OS. It was a windowing system, based on X, running on top of DOS, much like Windows 3.1 did. Anyway it was cool, but strained common HW of the day. OS/2 was generally seen as the alternative. What do you call it when all the products from a particular moment are left behind?

> It was a windowing system, based on X, running on top of DOS,

Ehhh.. DOS isn't much of an OS-- more of an abstraction layer over hardware. Desqview provided a significant extension by providing multitasking services and abstraction of the display device.

There was an old hint that OS/2 is half an OS, and DOS is a boot sector virus.

DOS is basically a bootloader program like grub at that point. People tend to forget how primitive it was. Not a whole lot different conceptually than a UEFI environment, but in "real mode" and minus the extended memory access.

Netware was another server OS that reused it. I think even some Linux utils could load it from DOS. Both loaded themselves directly into memory right over DOS if memory serves, because it had no ability to stop you. So yes, an OS, at least the 99% that matters.

>DOS is basically a bootloader program like grub at that point. People tend to forget how primitive it was

No. A BIOS wrapper with an ABI.

Yes. The products mentioned didn't use that, or if they did, once to load themselves.

Loadlin is another issue. On Windows 3.11, it depends. It runs perfectly on DOSBox, no DOS needed.

Despite the refrain at the time that it wasn't an OS, in hindsight I feel that's a pretty tenuous claim. It just used DOS as a hardware abstraction layer. The Win16 API provides processes, memory management, IO abstractions, and many other OS-like features. Eventually in the late 3.1 era they'd even move the disk drivers and file system into the Windows kernel. (The so-called 32-bit disk access.) Similar for DV/X in many ways.

Could never play with this because it was a paid product and the company didn't have any offers on my country.

I used to covet the DESQview/X ads in Byte magazine when I was kid. I ended up getting and Amiga which offered basically the same functionality. DESQview was technology from a different timeline.

I did end up running a bunch of surplus X terms in my home lab, MIPS R4400 based with 32MB of ram. It was glorious.

Surely there's a technical visionary behind this. I wonder who and what the story was of its creation?

This made me think of GEM and PC GEOS, both of which competed with DesqView prior to windows 3 owning the market. Apparently GEM got an X server and GEOS had it's most recent release in 2009!

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

It's nice, for a change, to read about an old technology that I am barely young enough not to have known about or used! That's a rarer feeling for me with each passing day!

I used this to play games and run my bbs at the same time lmao

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.

This takes me back. A friend of mine worked in Quarterdeck's Dublin office and got me a copy of DESQview/X. It was a great piece of software.

Oh wow. I fondly remember DesqView (no /X) and being completely amazed. I think around that time the larger buzz was around SCO Unix.

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/

I ran this for a while before I switched to Linux. It was a truly outstanding piece of software.

Interesting, hadnt heard of Desqview for years. Think maybe it got X server and client mixed up?

I always wanted to try this OS when it came out but I couldn't get a pirated copy of it.

just ran into that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_lfpdK7bQM

'DESQView/X 2.1 (x86) Motif running under VirtualBox'

I actually have a boxed copy of DESQview/X on my shelf.

Any chance of getting the binaries? Perhaps it can be disassambled

There's a button that says "Button" :)

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