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Comment by nope96 | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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!

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. :)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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