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Reminds me of lots of fun memory in last but great days of DOS as mainstream and dawn of Win32.

DOS/4GW was not the only game in town, there were a few of those 32bit extenders, I recall using sth called WDosX to run Delphi compiled (win32) exe in DOS. DOS/4GW was probably the most popular one partly thanks to the popularity of Watcom C compiler.

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PMODE/32 (and PMODEW/32) was another small and pretty popular DOS extender. I used it myself with WATCOM compiler and TASM occasionally :)

Another one was CWSDPMI. Just found it on my old backups.

As for DOS4GW popularity, it all exploded when DOOM was released :)

Pharlap was doing Pmode ; Zortech C (bought later by Symantec), were doing X32 which was compatible with Pharlap but like 5 times smaller ; djgpp (gnu cpp for dos/win then) had a variation

And you could mix and match (if u have written good parametrized makefile/s that is), i had like 6 compilers vs 3-4 diff.extenders (but not all combinations possible)

interesting times these were. internet? what's that?

Zortech actually went through several iterations and is still available in the form of the Digital Mars C and C++ developement system.

Unfortunately it looks like the X32 DOS extender link on the page below is dead.

https://www.digitalmars.com/

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