DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future

Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by flyinghamster on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @08:21PM (#29399561)

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.

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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by ja27 on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @11:58PM (#29400850)

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.

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