- loved, loved, loved desqview. and qemm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM
it was largely eliminated by windows 3.1 but before win3.1 it was the best way to run multiple apps at same time. the ability to devote a % of the cpu to various apps so that your word processor barely ticked over in the background while your spreadsheet was working away happily was wonderful on the limited pcs of the time.
- viler 6 days agoMost of the sysops I knew who ran DOS-based BBSs used to swear by Desqview, even long after win3.1x came along. According to them it was simply much more stable, and had less overhead too.reply
- bmonkey325 6 days agoIt was definitely popular with TBBS. I think PCboard wanted the machine to itself. I ran majorBBS up until the internet happened and then it just didn’t matter any morereply
- the ps/2 wa a major flop. but not in that it didn't sell units. i saw a few of them in ireland in the 1980s. but owners quickly learned that expanding the computers in any way was very expensive. the micro channel bus was better and more efficent than isa that it replaced but mca cards were around 4+ times the price of their isa counterparts.
it made quite a few ibm pc buyers choose non ibm pc computers after the ps/2
- Amongst consumers perhaps, but corporate I think it did well. I remember quite a lot of PS/2 at university in US/Canada at a steep discount in business and engineering disciplines.
My hatred of MCA was born out of keeping the magic disk. You couldn't get the bios to recognize the card until you applied the magic disk to the system.
- for us in the 1980s we had dos 4 on a shelf and stuck with dos 3.3.
we sold accounting software and it took a lot of conventional memory. 484k or so iirc. when you used dos 4.
* we loaded a keyboard driver for uk/irish keyboards. otherwise we'd have no £ for documents.
* share.exe for file locking
* ipx for novell networking
* driver for network card.
on dos 4 that usually left us about 4k short to run the accounting software. we had to wait till dos 5 came to move past dos 3.3
- 15 years old. that's ancient in gaming years :-)
- around the millenium my brother bought a pc to do the paperwork for his new business. he asked me to choose/setup the pc. did that and added a zx spectrum emulator and a few of the games that he remembered from the 80s on my zx spectrum +2.
a month later he asked me to remove the emulator as his kids were ignoring their xbox and playstation to play jetpac. he couldn't get near it and when he did, he found himself playing jetpac. it's a terrible game. it's the same screen over and over again. a little faster, a little harder. but very very playable.
- if someone sold a new palmos device that ran on aa or aaa batteries i would buy one in a heartbeat. for all it's limitations it did certain tasks very well. memopad, calendar and contacts. writing in graffiti 1 was fine for entering small amounts of data and local sync to a desktop with the cradle worked perfectly to sync data between multiple desktops.
- Yes! I think it might have to have wifi like iPod touch. As I don’t think I want to go back to a Batman digital utility belt of old - but ditching phone so I’m only on when I want to be … that’s a device worth purchasing
- i've reached a point where i don't want it to be a phone. they just turned off 3g in my country so my nokia 3310 from 2017 loses a lot of functionality when i lose it's browser with an rss reader that was so very handy.
wifi and bt to link to your network or phone to access data would be excellent. a shame there'd be no avantgo for mobile offline web which i absolutely loved on palmos. sync before you leave the house and i'd have news downloaded for the day to keep the boredom away.
with just those 2 protocol it could link to devices and services for many years without been dependent on special hardware to talk to the phone networks.
- seems there's a project to create a drop in open source replacement.
- reminds me of the computer story/fable/legend/myth
- Real Programmers don't use Pascal :-) http://www.wilk4.com/humor/humore6.htm
- I have local copy of that in my fun directory :)
- I was 14 or 15 when I first read it. Learning C on PC to get ready for windows, Mac, ST and Amiga coding - first read I thought was serious and I was never going to be a real programmer.
If you ask my colleagues they might say I’m still not ;-)
- Hehe, I am feeling sometimes like real programmer when I do disassembly of some old programs or games to hack stuff :)
Reading opcodes, binary patching.. Hard stuff, when you fight for few bytes to do jmp to add extra little functionality or fix a bug.
- Yeah. My first disassembly to bypass license check in a game by checking for “license found true” to “license found false” was a bewitching drug it was also like Prometheus stealing fire. Yes I know. But to a 12 year old with a $2/week allowance with games costing $35. A few indulgences was gonna be ok.
- Hah great story :) Had fun reading it it.. If only webpage would not be shitty...
- i harbour plans to set up a cpm system for home use. for an offline never connected to the web system. any rasp pi will at some point be connected no matter how barebones i make it. for updates, for convenience. with cpm there'll be far less incentive to do so.
a decent text editor, a spreadsheet, a basic compiler, maybe a small database. nothing fancy. distraction free, no worries about security, just 1 cpu and a limited amount of ram and storage working for me and me alone.
- Seems like there is a ton of good dev software available too.
Some time back, I read about a CP/M portable --Amstrad I think, where the creator had setup compilers for just about any language available pre 2005 or so.
Would be a neat machine
- amstrad had many weird and wonderful portable devices but none ran cpm out of the box iirc.
but it did ring a bell when you said cpm and amstrad. there was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/hh3rrp.../
- More
maybe i'm used to pcs in point of sales locations but they seemed to be the mankiest nastiest pcs i have ever touched. but even pcs in fairly clean accountancy departments were filled with dust bunnies after a year or two of use.