Comment by chipx86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipx86 | Hacker News Reader

This was a wonderful surprise. DESQview (and anything early Quarterdeck) holds a special place in my heart.

My uncle, Gary Pope, co-founded the company. I grew up with DESQview and QEMM as two of our primary pieces of software running on our computers.

I moved onto Linux many years later, and used to have a Linux box as my primary machine, but with a DOS computer sitting next to it, DESQview/X loaded up, and would use DESQview/X as a makeshift second monitor by using it as an X11 display server.

DESQview/X was based on X11R5, I believe, rather than X11R6, so I was a bit limited in terms of which software worked, but terminals were just fine.

Anyway...

A while back, I assembled all the DESQview/Quarterdeck material I had sitting around and put it up for others to look at. There's some stuff in here that you won't find anywhere else:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/htvf2edf3mrx0be/AABllqVhf0BzOytup...

There's a README with some background, screenshots, marketing material, photos, product reviews, and even a paper that my mom wrote up about DESQ (the precursor to DESQview and DESQview/X), with a little bit of background on its development, back in 1984.

Hope it proves interesting! :)

Could you ask your uncle to pull some strings and opensource it?

There are no strings to pull.

The company was sold to Symantec back in the late 90s, I believe, and he retired (for the most part). At that point, he no longer had the source code. Symantec eventually closed it down. Given the state of things like version control back then, I would be surprised if anybody has that source.

If I thought I could get it, I'd have asked for it loooong ago :)

Thanks for trying. You're a hero of open source.

amusingly, it looks like it actually was proposed 20 years ago, but now all the links are dead : /

https://slashdot.org/story/02/01/27/1950244/desqviewx-night-...

That's a shame :/

Looks like I commented on that thread way back then. And I think my comment there was at least mostly correct. I was always under the impression that much of the core of the product, the interesting bits, was done in assembly, or a layer on top of assembly (they used something called SYMPL in the DESQ and DESQview eras, but I'm not sure about DESQview/X). This would have been for performance and memory constraints.

I'll have to call and get clarification on all that. I might be mistaken.

In the later years, Quarterdeck transitioned to building DOS and Windows applications like CleanSweep. That was the era when Symantec bought them. I always got the impression that DESQview wasn't really an interest of theirs. It would be interesting to know what they would have done with the source in that era.

LOL cheers to continuity.

device=qemm.sys

next up: xtree!

That's a shame - like so many other closed source systems, acquisitions followed by sun-setting and all that hard (and smart) work eventually gone!

It's impressive that this software is long deceased and still people hold it dear - that's QUALITY, hard to find in today's world of half-baked, half-finished things designed to fail as soon as they're out of warranty.

On the technical side I wonder how the pre-emptive multi-tasking was realised without a MMU, i.e. pre-386? I heard QMX also had that, but it seems tricky to provide that in a stable manner without memory protection.

Preemptive multitasking is easy; you just hook the timer interrupt and switch stacks in the interrupt handler. The only tricky part is ensuring that your task queues are modified in such a way that an interrupt at the wrong time can't crash the system.

But it's true that, without memory protection, a bug in one program can corrupt all the other programs, too. The 286 did have memory protection, FWIW, and arguably an on-chip MMU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286#Protected_mode https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7683/how-... http://www.rcollins.org/articles/pmbasics/tspec_a1_doc.html

EUMEL and Oberon handled this by implementing memory protection in the compiler, but obviously that doesn't help with existing MS-DOS applications unless your compiler's source language is 8086 machine code. That's more or less the approach VMWare and QEMU used to virtualize non-virtualizable hardware. Not sure about Soft-ICE.

Also, btw, the 80386 came out in 01985, and DESQview/X came out 7 years later, in 01992.

Wow, thanks for putting it up - I was always curious about the world of QEMM software but missed it at the time.

There is some ongoing work to get this working in DOSEMU2.

Would you consider asking your family if they would be up for opening the source code for Desqview/X ?

The source code, along with all other assets, were sold to Symantec in the late 90s. My uncle doesn’t have any copies of it, and so much time has passed that there aren’t any contacts at Symantec to ask (if Symantec even preserved the source to begin with — they didn’t buy the company for DESQview).

Early in my career, I did work with a former employee of my uncle’s, who worked on DESQview/X back in the day, and we spoke a lot about that time. If he had the source stashed away someplace, he never admitted it.

I wish I could offer more hope than that. I want it too :/

Hey, instead of Dropbox - would you consider putting this on archive.org?

I plan to, but I want to run it by my family before I commit to a permanent record on archive.org. They're fine with sharing when it comes up, but, you know, due diligence.

Understood - thanks!

Thanks for understanding :)

It's on my task list for the holidays.

Is it done yet? ;-)

Thanks for sharing it.

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