Phar Lap FrontRunner – The Winning DOS Desktop for Windows | Hacker News Reader

Phar Lap FrontRunner – The Winning DOS Desktop for Windows

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71 pointstodsacerdoti21 comments

Like a smell from a cupboard in your grandmother's house, some of these names conjure up strong memories from your childhood.

"Smells like that DOS extender I wanted to use but couldn't afford. The one that was steamrolled into a thin red paste by DOS/4GW."

Spot on! :-)

It goes both ways too—just thinking about K&R C is enough to trigger the memory of the smell of the copy of K&R that I borrowed from one of my high school teachers which was imprinted with the smell of coffee and cigarettes (including a coffee ring on the front cover).

After reading that I now have a sudden craving for 4DOS and 4OS2.

I was young at the time and had “access” to a lot of amazing software packages that I’m still learning how amazing they were. Gotta wonder how things would be different if I didn’t give up on DESQView/X and decided to download Slackware one 1.44mb floppy at a time from a local BBS.

I ran my BBS on OS/2 for a couple years. Loved 4OS2.

Before Windows Embedded was a viable thing we built a product around Phar Lap ETS, which was their embedded RTOS with a Win32-compatbile API.

It was great. A productive, civilized development experience compared to many embedded environments back in those days.

The two companies I miss most are Phar Lap and NuMega.

NuMega! Their SoftICE was amazing.

I still have somewhere copy of SoftICE for DOS, W9X and NT/2K/XP.

But more interesting is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/matt_pietrek...

And there was always something ironic about using it to remove it's own protection - with a shout-out to +fravia (RIP).

Looks a bit like Mac OS X to me, only upside down: menu bar, app bar, status bar.

https://archive.ph/0JfHa

Phar Lap made amazing DOS extenders.

I liked DOS4GW better.

This is not Phar Lap’s DOS extender, is kind of an iTerm2 for Windows 3.x

Except that writing a windowed DOS terminal emulator involves writing an entire VGA card emulator, likely a VGA BIOS, hooking a bunch of DOS routines.... probably a DOS extender too.

Sure, but DOS4GW doesn’t do anything of that except the extender part

You still need a DOS extender to do any of those magic things. Drop into unreal mode, or into protected mode and load the interrupt tables.

Watcom C compiler or CodeWarrior for Mac

Phar Lap Dos extender.. Now that's a name I've not heard in some time..

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