DesqView/X: Night of the Living Dead Codebases

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!"

big surprise

[damiam]

$ host disvr.cjb.net
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?

[willybur]

Is it really as useful as people think? If its abandonware, then it has fallen so out of date that there is no point in keeping it hidden. Why would Borland release Turbo Pascal 5.5 and Turbo C(++?) 1.01 into the public domain when the "newer" (but still really old) versions of those apps are still private? Because the old ones have lost so much functionality relatively.

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 That's great if you're still coding in outdated setups.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.

desqview/x

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah! i have orginal boxed version of the desqview/x it was very hard to find it elsewhere , there is none in cleveland oh area and 5 years ago while taking first trip to los angeles and there were alots of used computer stores wow tons of odd and some rare computer hardwares and tillions boxes of softwares and came across the motherlode of desqview/x!!!!
cost? it was 24 bucks for orginal boxed version with thick book ,total weighed like 3 bricks!!!!
as far i know i seen them before at first opening of new microcenter around 90's it was selling new for $225.00 quite pricey those days
and with using it ,it can be a terminal cleint to remote linux x window server esy way :)

Offtopic Nostalgia..

[AnalogBoy]

Thanks, pazuzes. Now i'm going to have to have a flashback. **sits back**

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? :)

Desqview cutting and pasting

[MobyTurbo]

Ah, I also have fond memories of running a BBS under Desqview-386. The non-/X version, I only had a 386 with 4 megs of RAM. It multitasked DOS so well when properly tuned that I used one meg for a diskcache with Hyperdisk to provide staged writes (Microsoft's "Smartdisk" was anything but) with enough room to spare to run three or four additional programs. One window for a mail reader, one for the 24 hour BBS, and one or two for additional programs plus infinite tiny DOS shell windows for command line jobs. Not only that, I had Linux 0.95 (later 0.99) set up for dual-boot on it's own 20 meg partition. :-)

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.

Re:A new low

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the funny part.

As computer scientists, the guys who run slashdot are decent editors.

As editors, they make decent computer scientists.

I don't mean that as a joke. If these guys are MIS or computer science guys, then have them go to an english writing seminar. And hire JonKatz (I don't believe its a real person) an editor who will kindly work with him to improve his style.

However, if these guys are journalists with an interest in computers, then there's no excuse for some of the grammatical slop around here.

They never seem to bring the right tools to the job.

Re:Old software not always releaseable

[sql*kitten]

Rule #1 in dealing with businesses. If they have any reason to lie to you, they will. Plan for it.

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

[zoward]

People also forget that "releasing the source code" entails a pass through it to clean up bad code, no-ops, and, particularly, comments. How many times have you looked though the source code to something and seen comments like:

/* 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.