DesqView X386 came before either of them, so
plllllllllllllllllllllllllthhIT
quoting below becaue I really don't want to rack my brains to knock the info loose
to type out, I mean sheesh that was in the 80's....
But anyway, it was just as functional as Windows at that time and a hell of a lot
faster. I still have QEMM, QEMM386, DESQView, DESQView386 and DESQView-X in a box
somewhere around here, it was also stable out of the box, imagine that
You could basically change colors and bitmaps is all. But it was one of the starting
Windowing GUI OS critters which someone might consider Skinable?
"
DesqView was small and VERY fast (on a 386 or better CPU).
It was functional, but slower on a PC (8086 or 286).
QuarterDeck even came out with an implementation of X-Windows for it!
It was very impressive, but of course, it wasn't compatible with
Windows, so it died.
Brian
PS: The "PIF" files (program Information Files) for DesqView and Windows
3.x were compatible, even though they were developed independantly and
in parallel.
The reason is that each product leveraged the work of IBMs "OpenLook"
desktop environment from the early '80s.
(was it called OpenLook or OpenDesk or something else....?????)
In fact, most people don't know that the MS Windows GUI was designed by
IBM ... I have a very old hard-copy of "CUI: the Common User Interface"
which explains in pain-staking detail what a radio-button is, how they
look, how they work, and how the user interacts with it ... with a
keyboard or with a pointing device.
It covers check-boxes, drop-down boxes, combo boxes, and I think
spinners (but I'm not sure).
All very strange and new almost 20 years ago!
But any user of any version of Windows is completely familiar with the
operation.
And before I get flamed, the PIF file structure was composed of a base
structure (which was common across IBM, DeskView and Windows) and then
extended features. The extended data fields were not shared between MS
and QuarterDeck's products, but the "base class" was identical.
So, they weren't really compatible, but shared the same base structure.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Brian Empey, P. Eng.
President
Technical Solutions Inc.
Unit #1 7157 Honeyman St
Delta BC Canada, V4G 1E2
"
[Message Edited]
