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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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DesqView/X: Night of the Living Dead Codebases
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RE: Desqview (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, i'll "deffentntnetnly" check this out.
DesqView/X and serial port sharing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Public Domain *is* Open Source (Score:3, Informative)
--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks [onionnetworks.com]
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
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 That's great if you're still coding in outdated setups.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.
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.
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
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. ;)
Pazuzues should have written... (Score:3, Funny)
How much "editing" does being an "editor" involve, anyway? 8^D
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...
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
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
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