So. What is DESQview/X? Many people, in the current day and age, may have never even heard of this system from the mid-1990s.
Its predecessor, DESQview (without the “/X”) which was first released in 1985, was a multi-tasking, windowing system for DOS. It allowed someone, with very modest PC hardware, to run multiple text-mode DOS applications at the same time. With overlapping, resizable windows.
Pretty darned cool.
This multitasking wasn’t the cooperative multi-tasking that we saw in early Windows (through 3.11) and MacOS up through version 9. No sir-ee bob. DESQview had true, preemptive multi-tasking. Fast. Stable. Lightweight. It was downright impressive.
But it was all text-mode.
Then DESQview/X came along, in the 1990s, bringing a complete X11 (aka X Windows) graphical interface with it.
Impressive, for sure. I have heard of it, but never actually used it or even tried it. This article has piqued my interest, and I’m definitely going to fire up a VM and play around with this. For more in-depth information, there’s a book called DESQview/X: A Technical Perspective from 1990 on Archive.org.
Oh, I was going to say this was the thing a friend of mine had before Windows 3.1. But actually I think he just had some other interface. This looks pretty sweet, actually. Reminds me of when I first started trying to play with some *nix stuff on my Mega STe.
I remember seeing an ad for this way back in time, and thinking; yes, this is it!. And then I never heard about it again. I guess it just got run over by the windows marketing train.
What’s all the fuss about?
AmigaOS came out the same year as the text mode desqview, but it had a multitasking GUI operating on systems with limited resources.
There were various UNIX implementations which supported X11 too, some of which had fairly modest hardware requirements. Some of them could also run DOS programs (eg dosemu was available in 1992, xenix had something similar before that i believe).
Sure, but bear in mind that this came out the year after Linux 0.01. You needed a *lot* of expertise to get a free xNix working in those days. I was a SCO Xenix sysadmin from 1988, and even by 1995, I tried and failed to install Slackware — more or less the only distro that existed at that time.
SCO Xenix workstation would have cost more than the entire PC that DV/X ran on for a single-seat licence. Coherent would have cost 2-3x more.
As a student, I installed and ran the first Linux distro, SLS, without too much difficulty despite the installation consisting of about 30 floppies (no CDROM back then), on a 486 with 8Mb RAM and 80Mb partition (including 10Mb swap). Full system with dev tools and X Windows. This was probably in ‘91 or ‘92.
I had DESQview and DESQview/X and they were ok but the dos under pinnings showed. DESQview/X was the most interesting because of the X11 capabilities. It had reasonably modest hardware requirements but was not really stable enough. You still had a network stack that was drivers loaded under dos and when you tried to run to much it would occasionally freeze which was a pain. I was a mainframe systems programmer and also looked after some aix systems and needed both 3270 emulation and X windows. OS/2 was the saving grace at the time as it was bullet proof for this purpose so that’s where I went. Linux was also coming along at this point too. If I remember Quaterdeck were charging quite a bit for the SDK although maybe I am wrong there. Run linux with X11 and a Motif window manager and you could just about do the same thing. I still have the diskettes around somewhere maybe a bit of fun to run it up in a VM.
Wow, I remember DESQview ever so vaguely (I think it was actually “DESQview 386”). I witnessed somebody using it once but I never saw it used again. It seemed to have merit, but they could not compete with microsoft and their bundling.
Here’s another writeup:
https://infogalactic.com/info/DESQview
Be careful not to mix up different products.
• DESQview was a product. It ran on any PC but all the apps had to share DOS’s base 640 kB of RAM.
• DESQview/386 was a different product. It needed a high-end PC with an 80386 and it included the QEMM386 memory manager, so you could multitask multiple apps in text-mode windows, in up to 32MB or so of memory (in the 1980s).
• DESQview/X was a different product again, with a full GUI and the X.11 window system.
lproven,
That’s why I said 386 specifically.
“High end” is relative. I wasn’t involved with computers before 386/486 and so for me those were the baseline, haha 🙂 QEMM386 was very popular back in the day before microsoft included their own memory manager.
This multitasking wasn’t the cooperative multi-tasking that we saw in early Windows (through 3.11) and MacOS up through version 9. No sir-ee bob. DESQview had true, preemptive multi-tasking. Fast. Stable. Lightweight. It was downright impressive.
Well, Windows 3.x did preemptively multitask DOS applications along side Windows together with its applications, as long as you were running on a 386 or better.
DESQview was the only way to run your BBS and work on your PC at the same time… I remember it blew my mind when I first installed it.
Never went a head with DESQview/X since 1991 I migrated to VAX & Mainframes…
I see you’re a man with taste
Was going to comment the same. I used it so I could run my wwiv board and do other stuff at the same time.
What about you? What type of board you run?
Toastytech has a UI “review” on on Desqview: http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html
I never used DesqView or DVX but I remember them being advertised and reviewed in all the computer magazines of the time, most of them no longer publishing (Personal Computer World, What Personal Computer?, PC Plus) and the reason these systems didn’t take off in the early 90s was that most people didn’t have the technology to run them. Some businesses had 386 and then 486 machines but households didn’t. If they had PCs they were 8086s or 286s. 386 and 486 boxes with a couple of hundred megabytes of storage and decent colour displays cost thousands of pounds; I recall seeing an advert for Tandon 386s and one with about a gigabyte of storage cost upwards of £10K. It was only from the mid-90s onwards that standard PCs anyone could buy were capable of running Unix decently and that was when Windows 95 became dominant (the main competitor was OS/2 Warp and that was hobbled by lack of applications).
I forget the exact figures but until the Windows 95 era only around 15% of the population had access to a business class computer whether at home or the office. The computer on every desk and computer in every home didn’t arrive until later. I think it was only around the early 2000’s when computers began to more pervasive. It was only around 2010 when the majority of people had routine access to a computer. I don’t think I would be far wrong in saying even today no more than 15% of people with access to computers have professional training or use computers beyond the basic consumer level.
I can”t remember the exact figures from surveys of use and market size and years but they’re right enough to make the point. I’ll leave it to someone else to chase up the exact details.
I had DESQview on a comptuer my Uncle gave us. I never really figured out how useful it was, mostly because the system didn’t really have much usable software on it. A word processor and simple spreadsheet were all that were really useful. The spreadsheet had a word processor built into it, so I multi-tasked those two with in that app. The name escapes me, but not lotus, wordstar, ms word, wordperfect or anything anyone has ever heard of before. This was a former fortune 500 PC that was retired to his house without being wiped, so it might have been an internal piece of software. Safe to say the file format was not compatible with anything.
@Bill Shooter
At a guess Silicon Office. Nobody remembers it mostly because it wasn’t a US company hyped to the max but it was a contender for the big time along with Lotus 123 and Wordstar. Silicon Office also came with database and programming functionality. Silicon Office also needed a dongle to work so if you didn’t have that it might not be. That or it was a pirate copy. It wasn’t unheard of back then but certainly not as consumerised or accessible as today.
Well, technically Windows 3.x had preemptive multitasking of DOS windows when run on a 386 or better. When run on a 386, Windows 3.x was a fully 32-bit preemptively multitasked VM hypervisor running multiple DOS virtual machines, one of which was devoted to a slightly modified Windows instance, and its applications, all together in one VM. Each DOS window ran in its own virtual machine.
This brings back memories. This was very popular back in the days to run multiple copies of BBS software and have more than one phone line active.