> I remember running DesqView ... it must have been on a 286 (is that possible?), I

Yes.

In fact, I once ran it on an original 4.77MHz 8088. Just as an experiment, I ran two copies of BASICA in two separate windows. The two interpreters ran in parallel, and thanks to DesqView's lack of memory protection, it was possible to send data from one to the other via a simple form of shared memory IPC. (DEF SEG to pick a common memory segment between the two, and POKE/PEEK to send/receive data.)

The trouble with the 8088/286 class machines was really the lack of memory to run multiple applications and the fact that most serious DOS code assumed direct hardware access. Both of these made useful multitasking difficult. DesqView/386 fixed this by using QEMM to run the 386 in protected mode. This gave access to much more memory (if you could afford it), as well as memory protection and V86 multitasking. Fixed most of the significant issues with smaller systems.

While it might not have been comfortable I had two users separately logged in to a V30 machine (8086 clone) back in the day, one over serial console. That was with Minix 1.5. OS-9 on a CoCo could do a similar trick on even more limited hardware (6809 processor). The problem was with DOS's design.

(Video of someone doing two users on a CoCo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deBPEPPIdwk)

Yes, I knew several guys that used DesqView for running multi-node BBS's. Before DesqView, it wasn't uncommon for multi-node BBS guys to have a Novel server and one PC per modem per phone line.

I played with but didn't run it - I was running Maximus on OS/2 at the time :)

I ran a BBS using DESQview on an 80286 with a Rampage memory card. It connected nightly to the Fido BBS "Southern Star". Very cool stuff for the time.

DESQview was a huge help maintaining the board while it was actually running, and especially for the nightly tasks.

edit: I should add, the BBS software was Maximus.

Yep! This is me! Both DesqView and DesqView/X --- because I had a Renegade BBS with Frontdoor.

It was bugging me and I had to look it up. I was running Frontdoor with RemoteAccess. I have no memory of how it all worked though. What I do remember is; making ANSI screens with TheDraw and chatting with visitors who were dialing in (if I had any). lol.

omg you took me down a memory lane with that ANSI editing application. TheDraw was awesome and so easy to create and use blocks and coloring and whatnot. A must have if you wanted to try to do ansi/ascii art and also generate some screens for your ghetto local BBS.

thank you!

Same! Before switching from DesqView to OS/2. Those were the days! :-)

Oh, wow. Blast from the past. Let's see... Opus-CBCS, then QuickBBS with FrontDoor, then RemoteAccess with FrontDoor, at some point I was convinced to switch to D'Bridge. All eventually under DesqView for a few years, then under OS/2 until I went off to college...

I bet I still have all the floppies I saved everything to in my garage. Alas, the SyQuest 88MB removable disk drive (in all its SCSI glory) that I eventually ran everything off of once that "huge" 20MB Seagate drive filled up bit the dust a few years ago.

I, too, switched to OS/2. And then back. :)

What was the name of your BBS? What was your handle? I know of you as the security guy from Enteract, but didn't know you were in the BBS scene!

I keep pretty quiet about this out of embarrassment (there's stuff from me from when I was like 14 still hiding on the Internet --- I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`) but if you email me, happy to share. I was an H/P/A/V board scene person. If you knew NBFC or Whammy Bar, you knew my Chicago social scene; if you knew UPT, my actual interests. My silly Chicago BBS was kitted out to look like a Gandalf X.25 router.

>I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`

You should post a link!

Every once in a while when I'm using a common unix command, I find myself randomly re-encountering the frame of mind that I was in, the world outlook I had, and the sense of amazement I experienced when I first learned it as a kid. A sudden and explicable feeling awe at the breathtaking pervasive power of "cat" or "ls" or "echo" and how they fit together, and the very idea of a shell with commands and files and directories that you could name, look at, change, and move around. Remembering the excitement of discovering and fitting a new important puzzle piece into the growing model of what I was learning.

For me, it was like, I know how to write a DOS batch file, and here's Unix, you can do some of the same things.

I was smarter as an 18 year old than I am now, though! That's a thing my IRC friends from the time constantly talk about today; the people we were when we were shouting each other out in 1990s Phrack issues seem a lot sharper than we are now. We used to hang out and build "protected mode program loaders" for fun. You know, operating systems.

I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it.

Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.

I lost all parental credibility the day my kid learned that I used to use "Black Rose" as a BBS alias back in the 90s.

I've got much the same thing re: the "old days". My friends and I wrote a mess of (bad, but for the most part intentionally bad) text files that have mostly disappeared.

UPT! No kidding. That's a blast from the past. Sadly, I only remember a few particular people from that time. I got to meet just a few of them IRL. I was slightly too young to go to the various 'cons, etc, before the Internet came storming-in and killed the BBS scene.

I left home right after high school (not in a bad way!) and wound up going to basically every hacker conference for the next couple years, and a side effect of that is that a lot of those people are still personal friends today. There are good stories about where a lot of those people --- especially the UPT people --- ended up, but a lot of them are skittish about having those connections made and I never know which of them are or aren't sensitive.

We all thought we were pretty cool, but of course, there was an even sub-er subculture that was doing the UPT thing but on BBSs set up on X.25 networks; that's how you get to, for instance, the 8lgm people.

I can understand being skittish about it. We had to have crossed paths back then (though probably not IRL-- I went to a couple of the early DefCon's but that was it). I've mostly lost touch with everybody from "the scene", sadly.

There was a conversation on HN a couple of years ago where somebody posted a particular old X.25 NUA (ending in "..0177") that brought back a flood of memories. There was quite a thrill in "exploring" back then (wardialing, scanning the X.25 networks, messing with voicemail systems, etc). I never did get into that SCO Unix box that purported to be in a local Taco Bell... >smile<

All my childhood embarrassment was on Usenet. Then Google grabbed up all those old Usenet archives and there I was...

Same here. I also ran a local H/P/A/V board (mostly H/P, really) back in the early 90's. I wrote several text files, and collected/distributed 1000's more of them. Fun times.

DesqView, at least in its earlier incarnations, ran fine (if slow) even on an 8088. Eventually they moved to /386 and /X. It's kind of a shame that the /X version didn't gain traction, but by then there were other options ranging from Linux to OS/2 to Windows 95.

There was another oddball multitasking OS out there from the late 1980s as well: VM/386. It was originally developed by Softguard (better known for floppy-disk copy protection schemes) and then sold to and launched by IGC. It used the 386's virtual 8086 mode to run virtual machines, a far predecessor to VT-x and AMD-V. I never saw it in action, though. It ran separate DOS instances in each VM, but the 386 only supported real-mode VMs.

Yeah I had an IBM 5150 PC with DESQview and it was kind of amazing to be able to keep a vt-100 emulator dialed into school or a BBS while being able to run a local editor and even compiler. Sounds trivial today but it was a big deal on that old hardware.

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)

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.

DESQView was how most of us BBS SysOps ran multiple nodes. Being able to multitask DOS programs was amazing at that time.

Same here, was a must for BBSs