from wikipedia 'On May 21, 2020, Microsoft released the 8088 assembler source code for GW-BASIC 1.0 on GitHub under the MIT License.[1] '

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC

had a 3a, 3c, 5, 5mx and now a 3mx. a great little machine for distraction free typing.

for a pc that old it was remarkably clean inside and out. considering it was in a warehouse for a few of those years with a large door bring in dust and grime it scores even higher than i thought.

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.

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.

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

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.

seems there's a project to create a drop in open source replacement.

https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon