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Comment by Lapel2742 | Hacker News Reader

> “In my house”, we used something called SideKick Plus (1984), which wasn’t really a code editor: it was more of a Personal Information Management (PIM) system with a built-in notepad.

Finally! Someone who still remembers the best software ever written. I looooved Sidekick and we used it throughout our small company. It's so long ago. I remember only parts of it now but it was such a useful tool.

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The reason IDEs blossomed on DOS was because there was no multitasking. On unix/linux, even on a "dumb" tty with no GUI, you could hit CRTL-Z and your editor would go into the background and you'd be at a shell where you could run make or gdb or manage files. Then type 'fg' and your editor would be back exactly as you left it.

IDEs do all that in one huge program because if you exited your editor to run the compiler or run your program, when you went back to the editor it was starting up cold again.

TSR programs like Sidekick avoided some of this but were a poor substutute for real multitasking.

There are multitasking options using DESQview(/X) or Windows >=3.1. A friend of mine in high school ran a 4 line BBS using DESQview and 4 Courier 28.8K modems.

In real mode, it's possible to have a TSR that swaps the entire contents of RAM from disk. As long as such a hypothetical TSR is always loaded into a fixed location, it's possible to save and restore the entire DOS, program, and/or EMS/XMS session.

SideKick had the ability to take "screenshots" of the text shown in other applications. Being a TSR was cool, but stealing text from another program interface was mind blowing!

The best software ever written was ThinkTank (and next it to it, Memory Mate). Sidekick was great for popularizing the TSR, though.

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