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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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".

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.

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