| ▲ | mikestorrent 6 hours ago | |
A lot of folks never used it, but MS DOS 5.0 came with DOSSHELL which actually had support for task switching - not quite concurrency, but it worked on a 286. From what I've learned since, when you switched away from a program using Ctrl + Esc, DOSSHELL suspended it and dumped its conventional memory to a swap file on disk. Used this to great effect so I could swap back and forth between QBASIC and other utilities. | ||
| ▲ | tombert 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Yeah I saw that when going down my rabbit hole. Definitely a cool and useful thing for what it is. I just think that Concurrent DOS is cool because it is proper multitasking; proper time slicing and everything! And you could have multiple users logging into the same computer with terminals, à la Unix, all in the mid 80s! I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to try and make a case for them to release the source code, but I have had a heck of a time getting ahold of anyone that might be able to point me in the right direction. I suspect the rights for it now reside with OpenText or something and they don’t even realize it. | ||