Re: [PLUG] DESQview (was ... Byobu)

QEMM/396 was awesome. We used it to write TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) device drivers for data acquisition hardware, and my team at ASYST Software in Rochester, NY developed VIEWDAC (https://download.tek.com/manual/53207A(VIEWDAC).pdf) as the first 32-bit laboratory data acquisition software on a PC, released in 1991. One of our developers found a bug in QEMM/386, an uninitialized variable that caused our programs to crash every now and then, but which mostly did not as the memory usually came up zero, and things crashed only when it did not. He found it after a couple of days of painful debugging.

Regards

– Bhaskar

On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 3:20 PM JP Vossen via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

On 9/19/20 9:36 PM, Steve Litt via plug wrote:
> By the way, just from the man page, byobu reminds me of DESQview from
> Quarterdeck. I got a tour of the Quarterdeck headquarters once.

DESQview was awesome (+ QEMM). I had that running on a Pentium II circa 1991 with 3-4 things in it:
1. Terminal (well...DOS prompt...well, 4DOS prompt)
2. A shareware contact manager (I forget the name)
3. Lotus123 (I think, for a parts spreadsheet IIRC)
4. An editor or maybe WordStar, I forget

Since the contact maanger didn't expect to be running multi-tasked, it used to corrupt its DB quite often, so I had some script that made frequent copies.

Sigh, OK, I went down the rabbit hole looking for the batch files that ran that stuff. I didn't find them, but I did find an "about me" from that time (1991-1992) in a _PC Buyers Guide_ I wrote (pretty sure in Wordstar, and I can't find a good converter for that, but `less` is good enough):
"JP Vossen has been involved with Personal Computers for almost 10 years. He has a degree in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. He has worked on 8088 IBM XT clones, IBM AT's, Atari 800's, Zenith laptops, DEC Vax's under VMS and Ultrix-32 (UNIX), Macintosh Plus', Mac SE's, Mac Classics, Mac II's, and 80386 SX's. He currently runs the PC Support department of a multi-million dollar catalog sales company." How scary is that?

Later,
JP
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JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
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