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DesqView/X: Night of the Living Dead Codebases
Posted by
chrisd
on Sun Jan 27, 2002 06:48 PM
from the dreams-of-shells-past dept.
from the dreams-of-shells-past dept.
Pazuzues writes "I found something that you could say peaked my interest. It seems Symantec (purchasers of former company Quarterdeck) has release DeskView/X into public domain and can be downloaded now. DesqView/X was a GUI and OS extender that installed into DOS very much like MS Windows does. This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even gateway serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals. It was way ahead of its time and is a pretty decent toy to play with if you have a old 486 laying around. Anyways there is a petition being started that is petitioning Symantec to release the source code as OpenSource. I think this is a really good idea and could possiably help alot of other existing projects like WINE for example. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"
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No Brainer (Score:2, Funny)
Not to troll, but I think we all know what needs to be done and why it would be a good thing to do it.
RE: Desqview (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, i'll "deffentntnetnly" check this out.
Re: Desqview (Score:2)
(ok it was a neat idea, but I never saw anyone make good use of it)
Re: Desqview (Score:3, Funny)
DesqView/X and serial port sharing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Public Domain *is* Open Source (Score:3, Informative)
--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks [onionnetworks.com]
Nope (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source (Score:2)
Re:Public Domain *is* Open Source (Score:2)
If they have not released source code, and didn't license the binaries under some arrangement that gives you the right to demand source code (have we ever heard of a license like that???), then what they have done with the binaries has nothing to do with the accessibility of source code.
Ob-DesqView reference: It was a pretty neat system; at the time I used it, OS/2 was an alternative that was, for my purposes, preferable since it actually actively resisted crashes, which was important when coding fairly wildly-pointered C code...
The last release that I saw was not as stable as the second-last release, which was unfortunate. That might have been Microsoft playing their Windows isn't done until Foo crashes, consistently games....
DesqView was really cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
... my "modern" first computer was a 386DX... basically because it was 32 bit and had a math coprocessor. Damn that thing was cool. I had computers before that but this was the first one I thought was da bomb.
After a while I would tweak DOS to get the MAXIMIM amount of conventional memory 640k out of it. Quarterdeck Memory Manager did an AMAZING job of moving things around and forcing them to load in the correct memory segment.
It was always amazing to see how well it would increase your memory.
I would run QMM, DesqView for multitasking and Norton Commander as my filemanager, and QModem to get into my neighborhood BBS.
QMM was needed with DesqView because it required a lot of resources.
I was S000 37337!
Man I wish I had Linux 2.4 and Debian back then !
Kevin
Re:DesqView was really cool. (Score:3, Funny)
At the time the
Re:DesqView was really cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
For that era, I ran QMM, DesqView, XTree, {COMMO}, QEdit, SideKick. My BBSes ran everything from homebrew software (on my Apple ][) to Searchlight, Renegade, Minix (one node, on a floppy, users logged in as root. Every so often, I'd swap the floppy for a freah install). {COMMO} spent some serious time logged into a variety of *nix boxen, and two VAXes. Those were the days when if you asked nice, people gave you accounts on business machines or uni boxes across the country. Usenet had yet to be hit with it's first spam, FidoNet could transfer files across the globe, and everybody knew who uunet was. Those were good days.
I wouldn't have all these wasted brain cells which know every single bug in DOS/QMM. :)
Hehehe.. I used to be able to COPY CON PROGRAM.COM and write some decent code with alt-numpad sequences. I *know* there are some other /.ers out there that memorized all the various int 20h and int 21h paramaters.
It's that kinda thing that makes me feel good about Open Source (not just Linux). Popping in and adding mousewheel support to my favorite image viewer, adding a few features to my AIM client... also the "freedom of *nix" on my desktop now, with shell scripts, cron jobs, regex combos flying at the command line.
Heh... maybe *these* are "Good old days" too.
--
Evan
Re:DesqView was really cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
Man, I thought that part of my life was dead -- I used to work at Quarterdeck (it was my first "real" job) on their help desk - I was employee #23 in that department.
Sigh. Those were the good old days: writing white papers, messing with the Desqview API, staying up till all hours doing QC for the new releases, watching the programmers write and tweak their code using debug ...
big surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
disvr.cjb.net A 66.24.22.15
$ host 66.24.22.15
Name: syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com
Address: 66.24.22.15
$ ping syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com
PING syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com (66.24.22.15): 56 data bytes
--- syr-66-24-22-15.twcny.rr.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Run your site on a Road Runner cable modem and you KNOW it'll get slashdotted
Anyone got a mirror?
Is this that important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ancient X apps and Windows 3.1 applications? That's great if you're still coding in outdated setups. Current standards seem much more complex, open-ended and harder to emulate. Wine is probably not perfect for a reason.
Re:Is this that important? (Score:2)
>still coding in outdated setups. Current standards seem much more
>complex, open-ended and harder to emulate. Wine is probably not
>perfect for a reason.
>
>
Yeah it's a real bitch that people are more interested in DesqView/X than in
Re:Is this that important? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually there are no X apps bundled with DESQview X. It is just a graphically version of DESQview with a built in X server.
Alternative Download (Score:5, Informative)
Disk 1 [chsoft.com]
Disk 2 [chsoft.com]
Disk 3 [chsoft.com]
Disk 4 [chsoft.com]
Disk 5 [chsoft.com]
Disk 6 [chsoft.com]
Disk 7 [chsoft.com]
Disk 8 [chsoft.com]
FREEdisk [chsoft.com]
Slashdotted, obligatory mirrors (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.freemm.org/DesqView X/
http://www.bookcase.com/library/software/msdos.
Old software not always releaseable (Score:5, Informative)
I know of one scanner company that normally plays nicely (releases specs for the protocols for their SCSI and USB scanners) that cannot release their parallel protocol because of agreements they have with the suppliers of the chipsets in the scanners... Yet the company fields hostile "release the protcol you idiots" spam from "Open Source" advocates.
It's cool when a company can release an old product free - but in some cases it's just not possible...
- Steve
Re:Old software not always releaseable (Score:5, Interesting)
Me: I'd like any documentation on how to program your fine chips.
Nvidia: We can't open source our drivers because they contain 3rd party IP that we don't own.
Of course, they didn't answer the question I asked. The real reason they won't release any kind of info (docs or the source to their drivers) is that their plan is to segment the market via driver tweaks. The only major difference between their Quadro line and their Geforce line is the drivers. The Quadro drivers support accelerated anti-alaised lines. The Geforce drivers dont, even though the hardware does.
Since Nvidia wants to be the graphics hardware in all those Linux boxes that are replacing SGIs on animator's desks, they can't risk a bunch of GNU hippies writing drivers that let professionals use Geforce cards as if they were Quadros.
Rule #1 in dealing with businesses. If they have any reason to lie to you, they will. Plan for it.
Parent
Re:Old software not always releaseable (Score:3, Insightful)
If anyone has a reason, they'll lie to you. It all depends whether their reason is good enough.
I'm guessing that the money that nVidia make off their expensive Quadros will subsidize development that will eventually make it into their cheaper Geforces. This isn't a bad thing; the alternative is that the consumer cards are more expensive and less capable.
Re:Old *source code* not always releaseable (Score:3, Insightful)
/* Warning - *MASSIVE* kludge below */
or
/* I had to do it this way because Fred was too
*&^%$ lazy to code for this in the base
libraries */
Companies don't want customers to see this kind of thing, even in ten year old codebases. Even for companies who are willing to release their old binaries, it's hard to justify the time it takes to clean up the source code for release. Personally, I think Borland deserves kudos for treating this as abandonware and releasing the binaries. Let's hope more companies follow suit.
desqview learned me to do proper programming (Score:3, Interesting)
I had to walk through everything to fix it and it learned me how to threat pointers properly. A lesson learned which will never be forgotten
Okay... (Score:2)
Re:[ot] TightVNC (Score:2)
I want something that does like RDP to X translation.
VNC or TightVNC are still just screenscrapers/window scrapers
This wouldn't help WINE (Score:5, Informative)
In any case, the release of DV/X wouldn't help WINE in any way, really. DV DV/X allowed you to run Win 3.1 apps in the same way that you can run Classic Mac OS apps in Mac OS X, or that OS/2 2.1 could run Win 3.1 apps. Win 3.1 ran in a little box all to itself. It ran the entire Win 3.1 OE, not implemented the API (as Wine and Odin do). You can see a screenshot of this here. [209.196.53.130]
DV/X was pretty cool, esp. for a DOS user in those days, but it isn't really relevant anymore. I could see people with old DOS machines who wanted the binaries, that makes perfect sense. However, there's really nothing to be gained from the release of the source. It's not like someone can port it to MS-DOS/PowerPC. ;)
Re:This wouldn't help WINE (Score:2)
Pazuzues should have written... (Score:3, Funny)
How much "editing" does being an "editor" involve, anyway? 8^D
Offtopic Nostalgia.. (Score:2, Insightful)
1994.. Running my BBS locally.. Wanted to multitask... installed Desqview.. wow.. leet! Its like dosshell.. Only.. not! Oh, crap.. LORD is running slow on node 2.. time to tweak QEMM.. lets see if we can get that extra 2K out!
1995.. OS/2 warp comes along. I install it - that extra ~100K on top of 640 is LEET!!! I never go back.
I have to wonder.. How fast would Windows 3.1, DOS, or OS/2 boot on a 1.4 Ghz Athlon?
Re:Offtopic Nostalgia.. (Score:2)
How fast?.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Possibly too fast, depending on the applications you want to run.
Last year I was assigned a seemingly trivial "upgrade" project for a customer that runs an old DOS-based app. First of all, I had to find a new PC with an ISA slot -- not as easy as you might think, considering hat the customer wanted a "name-brand" PC with full warranty.
I finally found an HP model with a riser card for ISA support. PC-DOS loaded fine, but when I tried to start the customer's application, the machine locked up tight. After checking with the application vendor, I was chagrined to hear that the program will not run on anything faster than a Pentium 90.
Many DOS-based programs that ran on the ragged edge of (then-current) technology used hard-coded timing loops that simply can't cope with the clock speeds of today's processors.
So maybe DOS will boot super-fast on your Athlon, but there's no guaranty that it wil run many of your "vintage" programs...
Parent
I loved desqview. (Score:2)
I'm not POSITIVE about desqview/X's support of windows apps. If I remember correctly, it could export certain apps, but not those running in enhanced mode. Of course, I'm speaking about stuff I was playing with 10 years ago.
And as far as WiNE is concerned, they've pretty well gotten the 3.x API solid, and have for several years now.
-Restil
A low memory X server (Score:2, Informative)
It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!
So can XFree86. At least, the version I was using back in 1992 certainly worked on a 486 with 4MB of RAM. Slow, but functional.
Sniff sniff (Score:5, Informative)
Quaint things I remember about DV:
* Well-behaved BBS programs (including all the FidoNet tools) were DV-aware and would kindly give up its timeslice if they weren't doing anything.
* QEMM, the memory manager that came with DesqView, had a complicated "optimization" script that tried to rearrange all your TSR programs to maximize the amount of available memory under 640k. The size of each Desqview DOS session was limited to the amount of sub-640k RAM that was free when you started DV, so optimization was really important.
* You started different programs from the DV menu by assigning them two-letter key codes. I remember rearranging the codes at length to minimize the finger travel time needed to open my most frequently used programs.
* DV was really bad at switching video modes. If you happened to be running Windows under DV, the screen would turn to some kind of bizarre CGA/EGA mode when you invoked the DV menu.
DV/X was going to be the "next big thing," but I don't recall hearing about it after the feature article in HAL-PC magazine. In any case, it was quite expensive. Even QEMM was something like $40; I recall getting a copy as a birthday present, which became the only properly licensed piece of commercial software on my machine at the time.
Oh well, better mod this one (-1, maudlin nostalgia).
Desqview cutting and pasting (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyhow, turning nostalgia mode off, Linux Window managers could learn from Desqview's sophisticated cut and paste proceedures. It was possible to smoothly paste from, for example, a word processor to cells of a spread-sheet because you could specify keystrokes to go between each piece of data. If the cutting and pasting didn't require any special keys, just press return or space bar to make each line delimited by them. It was simple or powerful, depending upon your needs. KDE (and GNOME, etc.) rock, but they could learn a thing or two about clipboard management from humble Desqview.
DESQview/X is in Assembly (Score:5, Informative)
The sourcecode to DESQview/X is (at least for the most part) in Assembly. It was the only way they could create a full X environment that could fit on a couple floppies and take so little RAM. I know previous versions used a language that Gary Pope wrote called SYMPL, which was lisp-based and provided the back-end functionality for the multitasking on 8088 processors in the original DESQ and DESQview.
So, most of the code, if it is ever released, may not be completely usable to most people. It would still be an interesting read, however, and I signed the petition almost a year ago.
Another good source of information on DESQview is the newsgroup comp.os.msdos.desqview [google.com]. It seems to be pretty active, and has some good information on using DESQview.
DESQview and DESQview/X were great products. Have fun
Re:DESQview/X is in Assembly (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think that the sources can be released. (Score:3, Informative)
1) The X that is part of DesQView iw XR4. Don't know how useful that is.
2) As a former employee of Symantec, I do remember that not all of the source code actually made it over from QuarterDeck and I believe that the source code for DesqView was part of that. From what I understand, former QuarterDeck employees wiped a large number of hard drives prior to leaving the company. I don;t think managment really cared as Cleansweep was really the only product that they were interested in, even though Procom also survived (Although management was not really interested in Procom that much)
Is this really true? (Score:5, Informative)
Has anyone actually confirmed that this is true?
I've been unable to access the site http://disvr.cjb.net/freedv [cjb.net] referenced in the article. If this is an offical Symantec decision, why aren't the binaries available from http://www.symantec.com [symantec.com]? I just searched their site for the word "DesqView" and found no mention of this supposed release.
The alternative http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html [chsoft.com] posted here contains binaries but I can't see any mention of any official announcement by Symantec about the binaries now being in Public Domain.
The site http://www.freemm.org/DesqView%20X/ [freemm.org], also mentioned in postings here on Slashdot, (and last updated Wed Apr 11 2001) says the following:
It seems to me that this rumour has been around for a few months now.
Finally, if this is true, why isn't there any announcements about it on comp.os.msdos.desqview? [google.com]. And why did Amos Vryhof, presumably the owner of http://disvr.cjb.net/freedv [cjb.net] recently [sourceforge.net] start his own OpenDVX project on Sourceforge [sourceforge.net]?
I'd love for it to be true, but until I see some official announcement from Symantec, I can't say that I believe it.
Dammit! (Score:5, Informative)
Just to correct a few misconceptions. It is true, that Desqview/X does NOT run Windows applications without Windows in one of it's windows. Moreover, it is not public domain. I am working hard with people at Symantec to get the rights, but until then it is illegal to decompile or reverse engineer Desqview/X!
As for an OpenSource version of Desqview/X, I am looking for developers to work on it. It is Here! [sourceforge.net] I am getting all of the original documentation, and have all of the original API toolkits.
If your into X, and DOS join the crew, and maybe some good can come of this!
Have a nice night, and I think this will spark enough interest to push Symantec in the right direction.
-AV
Re:Dammit! (Score:4, Informative)
As I have said many times in many places. NO, Desqview/X is NOT Free. As far as where the submitter got the idea that it was free, I have no idea.
So, anyone who comes back to my site after the onslaught of slashdotters to download Desqview/X, you are doing it unlawfully. But, until the link to my site is off the frontpage of Slashdot, there is no site.
-AV
Parent
Low-cost XTerminal / use for obsolete hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
1. How do we make old computer hardware useful?
2. How do we get low-cost computers to lots of people?
Set up a bunch of 486s, or P-Is running DV/X, give them each a Gnome or KDE desktop running on some other server, and let people surf, or whatever. One high power machine, lots of terminals.
ObPine:
I remember drooling over DV/X back in the day
Re:Where can I find DOS? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Where can I find DOS? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.bootdisk.com
Re:A new low (Score:2, Funny)
The word is "piqued," although here it is used improperly. From M-W, it means "to excite or arouse by a provocation, challenge, or rebuff."
It seems Symantec (purchasers of former company Quarterdeck) has release DeskView/X into public domain and can be downloaded now.
It's "DesqView/X." It's "released." It's "the public domain." It's a run-on sentence.
DesqView/X was a GUI and OS extender that installed into DOS very much like MS Windows does.
Here we have an inconsistent use of tense. The last word should be "did." I wonder what "installed into DOS" could mean.
This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even gateway serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals.
It's either "X" or "X Window System." We have another run-on sentence. I wonder what "gateway serve" is. DesqView/X was both an X client and an X server, I believe. Of course, the X Client is what would run on the DesqView/X machine to be displayed on a remote X Server.
It was way ahead of its time and is a pretty decent toy to play with if you have a old 486 laying around.
Insert a comma after "time." It's "an old 486."
Anyways there is a petition being started that is petitioning Symantec to release the source code as OpenSource.
It's "open source."
I think this is a really good idea and could possiably help alot of other existing projects like WINE for example.
It's "possibly." It's "a lot." Insert a comma after WINE.
It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!
It's usually stated as "for Pete's sake," referring to Saint Peter.
How utterly abominable. What a disservice Slashdot does its readers, acting as its readers were unintelligent, and uncaring about either spelling or grammar. What a disservice Slashdot does to the English language.
Re:A new low (Score:2)
I willn't stand for it
Re:Confused (Score:2)
Releasing the binaries without licensing restrictions is not the same as putting the program in the public domain (I don't think you can put binaries in the public domain without putting source as well, as one copyright covers both). The major difference is whether derivative works require permission from a copyright holder.
If the program is in the public domain, open source licenses are inapplicable, because it's no longer anybody's to impose licensing restrictions on. Hence the question.
Re:Some corrections...quibble on Pete! (Score:2)