Reminds me of
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView
It'd be interesting to try this concept again on the wildly different computers we have now compared to 40 years ago.
4k monitors, high speed networks, dozens of cores, things are significantly different - might open some wildly exciting and new possibilities
Also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows
Although I’ve never succeeded in locating a copy of the spec, any implementations, even a screenshot… would be great if any of them turned up some day
This should have enough to build either an emulator or a window manager.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...
Also there is a firmware dump for the HP 700/70 which implemented it: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/700/HP_700_70_C1093/
Likewise for the Televideo 995-65: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/
and Borland Turbovision
I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021
I got Desqview/X running about 25 years ago on some Everex. An X Terminal that ran win16 software - Useless but fascinating.
IIRC there was some additional minimal runtime stuff like perl/awk/sed that came with it kinda like MinGW later on
Same experience here. It blew my mind but it wasn't really useable.
I was just about to same the same thing! I remember briefly running DESQview on a 386SX, before installing Linux...
Got hold of a free copy of this as a student, on underpowered PCs at college and it was a superpower.
... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS