Thanks Noel. I vaguely remember DESQview, and it did come up when I was researching this video. I was thinking that it taking a look at it might be interesting to do a follow up to this episode.

@@Operation8Bit Oh that could be fun! I remember being pretty happy with it back in the day. Also, I believe it ran on "top" of MSDOS instead of being a separate OS, but I could be wrong. It's been a while.

MAPLIN used concurrentDOS/386 on there 1980's/90's EPOS system, with terminals as cash registers

Yes, it was called DesqView/386, and featured interrupt-driven multitasking. One of the major flaws with Windows 3.x is that it used cooperative multitasking, which is terrible if you're running a BBS in the background. This is why OS/2 was so popular among Fidonet sysops. The problem is that in order to maximize window memory size, it needed to load all drivers first. Even with load high, once you've loaded the sound card driver, the mouse driver, and so on, you were looking at 630K memory. That's the biggest window you could open. DesqView/386 used many Topview conventions, including the ability to cut & paste between well-behaved programs. You could even run Windows 3.x in real mode, IIRC. It was fun sometimes to switch over so I could play Solitaire. :) There were other requirements, like using 16550 UARTS and a FOSSIL driver, but that still allowed a great deal of freedom for the sysop. I started with Opus BBS and later migrated to MAXIMUS BBS. After running into memory issues, I knew I had to upgrade one way or the other. OS/2 was massively superior to W95, but the latter was cheaper. When I heard that IBM was charging for their development kit, while Microsoft was literally giving theirs away for free, I saw the writing on the wall. Bought 4 more megs of memory & a CD-ROM kit. A whopping 2x speed! No, I was not about to load Win95 via floppies! Once I integrated my new hardware I was running a 486dx2-66 with 8 Mb of ram. One of the cool things about Win95 is that NT console apps would work as is, so all I had to do was drop in the NT executable for MAXIMUS and it worked flawlessly. ... Some of my regulars could tell that I was playing Quake locally, as there would occasionally be long pauses when they were online. Never dropped any data, though.

Awesome! Thank you!

Thank you for subscribing and thank you very much for the great feedback! 🙂 We're taking a short break for the holiday and the plan is to get back to the sausage making after Christmas. PS: Not sure Sparky would agree with you, he has to listen to me for hours 😂

Glad you enjoyed it! I've seen some of your videos lately and this seems something right up your alley. I wonder if we could get it to boot on one of those HP Thin Clients you were showing the other day?

@@Operation8Bit challenge accepted!! I'll give it a shot :-)

@@RetroTechChris Ping me and let's discuss. support@operation8bit.org

Glad you enjoyed it

Thanks Dave. Not many people did, which is why I thought it would be a fun (and different) topic. 😀

Interesting, do you remember if they set it so that they could use multiple modems?

Hey, thanks! 😃🍹

@@Operation8Bit yw :) keep em coming!

Yeah I know right? I have a coworker that did a screen share the other day, and he had 4 browser windows and each of them had to have at least 20 tabs each. That guy is a pro! Thanks for the sub! :-)

Wow, that's very cool! What was it written in? Assembly? And thank you very much for the for the sub... 888 is a great number! (I wish YT had a way to upload an image to the comments, I would post it)

@@Operation8Bit Hi, Yeah, all assembler. Not sure if it was MASM or pure ASM. I certainly used MASM a lot back then. I've forgotten probably 90% of it :(

@@retroretiree2086 I never learned ASM back in the day, my buddy Scott did a lot of bit twiddling in MASM and he tried to teach me but it never took. However, I've picked up a bit of 6502 Assembler over the past few months just for fun.

​@@Operation8Bit I never did any 6502 there were a couple of other guys in the same company who did. I did Z80, 8086 and 68000. I mostly wrote device drivers for FDDs & HDDs for quite a lot of the different systems that were available back then.

Glad you enjoyed it, and yeah we're hoping to find one as well. It would be great to do the follow up where we connect it to a terminal

LOL... That's my Christmas Hawaiian shirt, it has Santa hanging out on the beach. Thanks for subscribing!

Cool. I used Real 32 for years, we built a flight planning system for the airlines, on it. Was great!

Thanks Al, but you may not be as happy after you see all the behind the scenes meat grinding 😂

Based on the feedback in the comments, we've been thinking about a follow up that covers the multitasking apps available for DOS, this is definitely one to add to that list. It should be noted (because if I don't someone else will :-), DOS Shell was more of a task switcher and didn't have true multi-tasking capabilities. Thanks for the feedback!

There was that one and a few others like that one and DESQview that @Noel's Retro Lab mentioned in an earlier comment. Byte magazine did an article on a few of them that were available at the time and DESQview was their top pick

I actually bought Desqview/X, but it never caught on.

Do you mean Desqview? QEMM is a memory manager

Do you mean Desqview? QEM

I never heard of that before this. I need to go check that out. Thanks for the info 😃

@@Operation8Bit No problem! I'd like to see a video about what you can find. Even though it's no longer DOScember... Maybe for JanUnixary?

Thanks for subscribing, glad to have you here! Yup, my little 600XL is in a place of honor right there beside it's big brother the 800XL, and not that far from it's cousins the 130 XE and an XEGS. That little 600 is special, I am the second owner and I promised the person I bought it from that I would give it a good home. You know, I really need to do more videos on the Atari computers. :-)

Not really! Its main use was as a cheaper alternative to a small network, for running accounts software and things, where 1 PC could serve 4 or more terminals, all with people working on the same app -- updating sales figures and so on. It was too expensive to be a standalone single-user OS. In the late 1980s, half a dozen PCs and a network would cost at least £30,000 or so. One £5000 PC and a few £500 dumb terminals could do the same job with CDOS, and save half the budget.

Cool. What was it used for?

@@Operation8Bit One was a custom job for a large wholesale nursery, 4 users on Wyse 50 terminals and LA120 Decwriter printers, using a custom application written in Dataflex. Another was for REQUEST TV, one of the earliest pay-per-view movie outfits.,all written in C. Customers dialed an 800 number to buy a movie, I handled ANI data from telco, figured out which headend the subscriber belonged to, and sent a message over the VideoCipher data stream to that headend, which then authorized the customer box.

Interesting that went Open Source. Do have a link you can share?

Welcome! Thanks for subbing!!

That's because just about every interrupt driven multitasker used the 386's x86 mode, which allowed multiple virtual 8086 systems to run concurrently. ... Aaaaand where's Amiga today? 😉

The DOS with more steps was just another of my very bad jokes :-) Yes there was an API that developers could tap into that would allow them to take advantage of the multiuser feature. I did some PoC work with this for a medical billing system that I was porting from the IBM System 36, but I never got it to work exactly the way I wanted, so I wound up going with SCO XENIX. The Wikipedia article on CDOS has some more information (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS#Application_software). Also one of the other viewers that commented (Liam) seems to have a lot more actual "hands on". He may be better able to shed light on the API.

Which is weird considering... Novell? Add to that, Novell bought out Concurrent for MultiUser DOS... Oversimplifying, please don't beat me up in comments :-)

Stay tuned... we have a follow up coming out soon that digs into the details. SPOILER!!! We also have got it all worked out... but you have to wait to see how ;-) (Yeah, we're assholes. But we needed to bring in some outside help and there is more sausage making in the works getting that all coordinated)

Hi Liam, thank you for taking the time to leave your comments. The one part about the mispronunciation was just me totally flubbing the line (I do that a lot, but we normally catch it in post). The way I planned to pronounce it was “eighty, three eighty-six”. TBH, I usually just say “three eighty-six” Aside from that, thank you for providing the additional context on the points I skipped. It’s also nice to know that I’m not the only one that worked with this OS, although based on your other comment it sounds like you did way more with it than I did.

It happens to us all. I must confess some vested interest - I am trying to revive interest in DR-DOS myself. I have some downloads and must work on a VM image. Maybe in time for DOScember! liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html

I love that all those old episodes are still available on YT, including the CDOS one

OMFG, I totally forgot about that! Yeah, if you saw us together off camera it's probably closer to that!

Hey Joshua, Welcome aboard! If you’re into drunk computer history, then you definitely found the right channel! 🍹 Thanks for the feedback on the timing and editing. This has been something that I've been working on since we started. If you go back to some of my earlier videos, you can really see the difference between those and some of my newer ones. Still room for improvement and constructive feedback is always welcome. --T

@@Operation8Bit no problem, hope it came off as nice as i think you've got a good thing going here. i didnt really review the older videos. but i can certainly see the quality you've sought to bring to your channel. in all its great!

@@thedogwooddandy Yes it did, and again thank you for the constructive feedback. I'm sure that there are more than a few others that may share the same thoughts. The only we get better is to get good honest feedback. Great example are some of the comments we got on audio. Not only did we work to fix it, we even picked on ourselves in this episode about it :-) kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iZmBqL2js9Oze3k.html And yeah, that is a very loud shirt ;-)

That's pretty clever! I'll pass it along

Back in the day one of the things I used CDos for was for a medical billing system I wrote. We connected 4 Wyse terminals over a serial connections to the PC running the software. It worked, but I remember that there were a lot of setup issues. On the topic of setup issues, if you haven't you may want to check out the companion Nibbles & Bytes video that covers some of the problems we had. Also there is a partner video by our friend Retro Tech Chris where he connects a remoted dumb terminal to our CDos Server. Link to the companion episode: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qMVlq7SU2Kyvhmg.html

Actually it is. I worked with this OS IRL back in the 90's, and despite the shortcomings, the marketing pretty much met with the reality. Unfortunately we couldn't get it t run on modern hardware for this demo, If we can get our hands on a proper 386 we would love to show what it is capable of .

Yes, it really multitasks. And the terminals can have 4 sessions, too. PCs natively support 4 serial ports, so 4 apps on the host plus 4 apps per terminal -- in theory, 20 concurrent programs, each with up to 640kB of RAM. If you could afford that much memory! What CDOS never did was windowing, so you can't see more than one app at once. How I personally used it in the office: I installed it on demo machines, set them rendering a big fractal that would take hours in the background, then switch consoles and load MS-DOS' COMMAND.COM so it looked like a vanilla DOS PC. You could run apps and work on it and never know that it was working flat out in the background. 386s didn't need heatsinks and had no cooling fans, so you could not hear that the PC was working much harder than normal...

LOL, yeah I flubbed that line pretty bad :-)

@@Operation8Bit No worries! recommended from DOScember. I have a couple, actually one I may be interested in getting rid of. you have a discord or anything? :p

No discord, but you can reach me at support@operation8bit.org (I know, email... so early 2000's)

@@Operation8Bit I have a vanity domain as well, so. :p

Pretty much sums it up

Um, no.

True... but Snoopy is 😄