DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future
I've written about this software in the past, but I was a former user for quite some time.<p>Back in the day I ran a multi-node BBS and like the vast majority of BBSes in my area, they were all DOS-based applications[0].  I had written my own BBS software, originally a Telegard 2.4(3?) hack.<p>It was basically impossible to get a multi-node system working purely with DOS/Windows[1].  The (few useless) options for multi-tasking were nearly non-functional and this became monumentally worse when I had re-written the library which put text on the screen with some fancy assembly language that made everything positively <i>fly</i> on my 80486.<p>Enter Desqview/X -- for the DOS era, it was crazy.  It just worked.  Very few things other than the simplest in DOS "just worked".  Aside from the odd interface (which wasn't all that much more odd than Windows 3.x) it performed exceptionally well, managing three active nodes without choking.  Meanwhile, dear old Dad could fire up Lotus 1-2-3 while the BBS was running and didn't have to take the whole setup down[2].<p>[0] Telegard (later Renegade) and T.A.G. were the most common in my area code. I ran custom software that I wrote.<p>[1] Not entirely true, I know before I ran Desqview/X I was doing something else to make everything work, but it fell apart when I altered the software to improve screen writing performance.<p>[2] My dad was a small business owner who did his and the businesses taxes, himself.  So February~AprilI had to figure what to do with my time since the computer was occupied during most non-school hours by my dad.