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liam_on_linuxThe PC press had rumours of Quarterdeck's successor to DESQview, Desqview/X, from around 1987-1988.
That is roughly when I entered the computer industry.
Dv/X was remarkable tech, and if it had shipped earlier could have changed the course of the industry. Sadly, it came too late. Dv/X was rumoured then, but the state of the art was OS/2 1.1, released late 1988 and the first version of OS/2 with a GUI.
Dv/X was not released until about 5Y later... 1992. That's the same year as Windows 3.1, but critically, Windows 3.0 was in 1990, 2 years earlier.
Windows 3.0 was a result of the flop of OS/2 1.x.
OS/2 1.x was a new 16-bit multitasking networking kernel -- but that meant new drivers.
MS discarded the radical new OS, it discarded networking completely (until later), and moved the multitasking into the GUI layer, allowing Win3 to run on top of the single-tasking MS-DOS kernel. That meant excellent compatibility: it ran on almost anything, can it could run almost all DOS apps, and multitask them. And thanks to a brilliant skunkworks project, mostly by one man, David Weise, assisted by Murray Sargent, it combined 3 separate products (Windows 2, Windows/286 and Windows/386) into a single product that ran on all 3 types of PC and took good advantage of all of them. I wrote about its development here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/18/how_windows_got_to_v3...
It also did bring in some of the GUI design from OS/2 1.1, mainly from 1.2, and 1.3 -- the Program Manager and File Manager UI, the proportional fonts, the fake-3D controls, some of the Control Panel, and so on. It kept the best user-facing parts and threw away the fancy invisible stuff underneath which was problematic.
Result: smash hit, redefined the PC market, and when Dv/X arrived it was doomed: too late, same as OS/2 2.0, which came out the same year as Dv/X.
If Dv/X had come out in the late 1980s, before Windows 3, it could have changed the way the PC industry went.
Dv/X combined the good bits of DOS, 386 memory management and multitasking, Unix networking and Unix GUIs into an interesting value proposition: network your DOS PCs with Unix boxes over Unix standards, get remote access to powerful Unix apps, and if vendors wanted, it enabled ports of Unix apps to this new multitasking networked DOS.
In the '80s that could have been a contender. Soon afterwards it was followed by Linux and the BSDs, which made that Unix stuff free and ran on the same kit. That would have been a great combination -- Dv/X PCs talking to BSD or Linux servers, when those Unix boxes didn't really have useful GUIs yet.
Windows 3 offered a different deal: it combined the good bits of DOS, OS/2 1.x's GUI, and Windows 2.x into a whole that ran on anything and could run old DOS apps and new GUI apps, side by side.
Networking didn't follow until Windows for Workgroups which followed Windows 3.1. Only businesses wanted that, so MS postponed it. Good move.
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Date: 2025-06-23 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-05 01:43 pm (UTC)Very true.
IIRC, Dv/X came with Motif but it was optional and it defaulted to some lighter toolkit. Motif might have been a paid extra.
I wonder if there was some cross-platform GUI that wasn't apparent at the time that coulda been a contender?
Like Java Swing, which goes back to 1997...
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Date: 2025-07-05 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-08 05:46 pm (UTC)Fair enough. That's about a decade earlier...
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Date: 2025-06-26 01:12 pm (UTC)Hmmm, unless you had something like a Sun SPARCstation or a DEC VAXstation, DV/X did not add much that DV/386 did not give you. The ability to run something on another DV/X PC connected via NetBIOS or IPX/SPX, while knowing that the program was unlikely to be multiuser safe?
Even if you did have that Sun or DEC workstation around, you had to pay more for the Quarterdeck's TCP/IP networking. Memory is telling me both DV/X and that cost more than DV/386 did. Obviously that wasn't a problem for its target market: those workstations weren't cheap either and accessing your (expensive) *ix programs on commodity hardware could still work out cheaper, even after paying hundreds for the DV/X and networking add-on. But that was never going to be a large market.
DV/386? Fab, and I could see the case for spending the money instantly. About the only thing I would have changed is the frequency of the multitasking interrupt - they went for the 18.2Hz clock rather than the 60Hz(?) that Digital Research did in what ended up being called MultiuserDOS.
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Date: 2025-07-05 01:47 pm (UTC)Yes and no.
Yes, TCP/IP cost extra. I don't think Qdeck sold its own, did it? I thought it worked with a few of the market leaders, like Hummingbird or Wollongong or some things like that?
When free ones arrived later, thanks to IBM and MS using NDIS, and Novell using ODI, Dv/X couldn't use it. Of course.
Advantages over DV... there were a handful.
It had Adobe Type Manager built in. It could dynamically resize the text in DOS boxes, on the fly. DOS apps obviously didn't understand window sizes and things so couldn't be resized, but Dv/X just resized the font and didn't tell them. Worked well. You could have tiny windows for monitoring stuff and big ones for working on.
I think it also virtualised VGA somehow so you could have graphical apps in Windows, including Windows 3.x in Standard mode. Handy for some, e.g. hardcore Excel users.
Tell me more about this interrupt switching part, I don't know about that. They used existing ticks, but there was a choice of them available? I didn't know that...
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Date: 2025-07-05 02:38 pm (UTC)I believe they did do a TCP/IP add on (or bought it in).
DV/386 would at least let you resize the visible bits of text windows, so you could have the bottom line, say, while the program thought it was full screen.
There was an 18.2Hz interrupt - clock purposes? DV used it to switch between programs (you specified priority in terms of how many 18.2Hz interrupts it had before some other program got a chance).
Digital Research did something like alter the frequency to 60Hz and did its multitasking in units of that.
You could tell the difference, especially if were managing multiple modems or had stuff scrolling on the screen.
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Date: 2025-07-08 05:45 pm (UTC)I found this:
« Currently, the DESQview/X Network Manager can communicate using the following network APIs and network software: NetBIOS, Novell Netware IPX/SPX, FTP Systems PC/TCP, and Novell's LAN WorkPlace for DOS. Check with Quarterdeck Office Systems for an up-to-date list of network APIs/software supported. »
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/phrensy/pub/www/dvx/dvxtechp.htm
I never even looked at clock interrupts, but you're right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_interrupt_call#Interrupt_table
« 08h This is the real time clock interrupt. It fires 18.2 times/second. »
Couldn't quickly see anything about CDOS, though.