I remember reading about (or at least seeing cool looking ads) for GeoWorks, DESQview (and DESQview/X!), and GEM in magazines like Byte in the early 90s. I was always sad that I never got to try out any of them on my machine.
I used them all. They all lost to windows because of "Developers Developers Developers". i.e. no one really wrote apps for them (besides AOL for Geoworks).
Desqview was neat it allowed you to multitask dos apps, but dos 5 basically included same functionality in a more restricted forms (basically how MSFT did to all of Quarterdeck's stuff). Desqview/X was nice if you were in an unix environment, but vast majority of users were not.
GEM was along the same lines as geoworks, but recall it being less usefull.
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I remember reading about (or at least seeing cool looking ads) for GeoWorks, DESQview (and DESQview/X!), and GEM in magazines like Byte in the early 90s. I was always sad that I never got to try out any of them on my machine.
OpenGEM has been a thing for a while now, ever since DR open-sourced it: http://www.opendawn.com/opengem/
It's even an optional extra for FreeDOS, if you want to try it in a VM: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dist...
I used them all. They all lost to windows because of "Developers Developers Developers". i.e. no one really wrote apps for them (besides AOL for Geoworks).
Desqview was neat it allowed you to multitask dos apps, but dos 5 basically included same functionality in a more restricted forms (basically how MSFT did to all of Quarterdeck's stuff). Desqview/X was nice if you were in an unix environment, but vast majority of users were not. GEM was along the same lines as geoworks, but recall it being less usefull.
I seem to remember the main reason people ran GEM was because it was bundled with Ventura DTP software.
I wrote software for GEM, both on PCs and the Atari ST.