The Software That Failed To Compete With Windows 347
harrymcc writes "When Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0 back in November 1985 — it turned 25 on Saturday — it wasn't clear that its much-delayed windowing add-on for DOS was going to succeed. After all, it was a late arrival to a market that was already teeming with ambitious competitors. A quarter-century later, it's worth remembering the early Windows rivals that didn't make it: Visi On, Top View, GEM, DESQview, and more."
I used GeoWorks (Score:3, Interesting)
I was working as a paperwork generator for a school funding appeal in 1994. They wouldn't pay the bucks for Windows 3 (why spend $45 when you're only trying to make $3 million), but I did get GeoWorks to run on my 386SX (which I had only because when my 286 died, they couldn't get a replacement 286 motherboard; they were very annoyed). It was very nicely designed, ridiculously usable and very fast. Fatal problem? It was ridiculously unstable and would crash if you looked at it funny. Windows with Wordpad would have beaten it as a productivity tool. Oh well.
Desqview (Score:5, Interesting)
was awesome. I used it to run multiple nodes on my Renegade BBS. Of course, back then nothing was truly multitasking, but this was pretty darn stable for its time. We moved to Windows '95 when we were told that it would provide better multitasking abilities.
It was at that point I started truly despising Windows/Microsoft. "What are all of these files in my root directory?" I remember exclaiming. I always kept a very organized filesystem, and now my operating system was telling me I couldn't do that anymore.
It was all pretty much downhill from there.
Re:I used to use GEM / Ventura (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember that when you ran DOS apps when GEM, it would open a dialog asking how much RAM you wanted to allocate for the program. Hardly a user-friendly desktop.
GEM (Score:4, Interesting)
GEM was a damn good piece of software. It was actually multiplatform (CP/M on 8088 and 68000, DOS (any CPU), and I think I saw floppies of GEM for the Commodore 64.
Incredibly powerful considering the tiny resources it needed. One of the first DTP softwares, Ventura, was based on GEM for its user interface.
Like X, GEM isn't quite an operating system. It's a graphical shell. Well... more or less what Windows 1.0 was!
Re:Desqview (Score:4, Interesting)
Lord I miss those days. I ran Renegard multinode until I bought MajorBBS (which was really efficient, but proprietary).
Remember the Extended versus Expanded memory hub-bub way back when? 640K is enough for anyone!
Re:OS/2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Wayfarer (Score:3, Interesting)
My favorite Windows alternative back in the early 1990's was Wayfarer, a freeware replacement for the Windows v3.x Program Manager. Long before Microsoft figured out how to do tabbed and nested windowing, Wayfarer did both.
My favorite trick as to post a screenshot of the Windows Program Manager as the screen background and then turn off Progam Manager completely and replace it with Wayfarer, which would minimize to a single desktop icon. People would click on what looked like Program Manager icons with no result.
(Including the tech support guy who showed up unannounced at my desk one day to install software while I was out and was five minutes away from wiping and reinstalling my entire PC because he couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. I told him the next time he wanted to hijack my PC during the work day he needed to schedule an appointment so he didn't interfere with my work day.)
Ah, those were the days when we could still have some fun with customization. Now it's all "safe choices" or lock-downs, depending on how you look at it.
Re:I used to use GEM / Ventura (Score:3, Interesting)
GEM Desktop was great (I had it on an Amstrad 1512, with dual 360K 5.25" floppy drives!), but crippled compared with the version running on Atari STs because they removed the "trash can" thanks Apple being predatory.
Deskmate (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hard to forget hell. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Twenty-five years and two days later, it’s not just hard to remember an era in which Windows wasn’t everywhere"
Bullshit
My thoughts exactly, it makes me wonder how old this kid was (and will he stay off my lawn?)
Given just how retarded Windows 1 was compared the original Mac we should be more surprised just how successful they've been. Even Win 3.1 only competed with Apple on price. If nothing else Microsoft has my respect for putting lipstick on that pig and finally delivering XP and Win 7 which are pretty damn good.
(Disclaimer: my personal machines run OSX, iOS, Win7, Vista, XP and Linux ... as an oldschool Linux junkie who has version 0.9 on floppy disk I'm almost ashamed to admit that my OS of choice these days is Win 7)
XTree? (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the particulars of the DOS environment, and the capabilities of the displays at the time, I found XTREE much superior to anything prior to Win95.
(Excluding the Macintosh and Amiga GUIs, of course.)
Re:DESQview (Score:5, Interesting)
I started running my BBS under DESQview. However, I then wanted to learn to program C++, and went out and bought Borland C++ for Windows. Silly me. At least it was the student edition (read: cheap). So I thought, well, Windows 3.1 claims to multitask DOS apps, so why not try it? Well, just running the single DOS app under Windows, not even having anything else loaded, on a 486dx2/66 w/16MB RAM, resulted in users complaining about speed - on their 2400 baud modems. So I knew that was a no-go.
Then, someone at work (I was a co-op student at the time) suggested OS/2. After buying a student copy of that, too, I installed it. I could run two nodes of the BBS at 33.6kbps PLUS compile under Windows, or I could run one node AND use the other modem to connect to the internet via the university, and load up a web browser and do all of that stuff while the DOS BBS continued to run just fine.
Later I switched from Renegade to Maximus which had a native OS/2 version. Used a lot less resource that way, but even then, Renegade for DOS still *worked* under OS/2, which is more than I could say for the same machine running DOS 5.0 / Windows 3.1.
I continued with OS/2 for years, and avoid Windows still, just because it has never, in my estimation, been able to handle what I threw at OS/2, or now throw at Linux. I still miss the OO desktop OS/2 had, that and the Extended Attributes. They were really really useful things - metadata attached to a file that when you removed the file, the metadata automatically went away. Brilliance. Copy the file, the metadata copies along. Move the file, the metadata moves with it. Absolute brilliance. The 64KB limit might have been a bit low to continue on into today, but the idea was still awesome.
And Symphony didn't make this list? (Score:3, Interesting)
A spectacular opportunity, dommed to failure for all the same reasons as the others.
Nice trip down memory lane... I used DeskMate at home for a while, got into configuring DesqView for clients, and talked clients out of most of the rest.
I used DR-DOS for a long time to generate bootable floppies for stuff like patches and Norton Ghost, avoiding some of the unpleasentness of the various MSDOS problems. Ultimately, didn't DR-DOS go to Caldera? I have some of those disks still.
But Windows was pretty much unstoppable. My old buddies from then still lament that Apple never wrote Mac OS for Intel processors, but that would have gotten Apple into DLL and driver hell, trying to support even the worst drivers from the worst writers, and then getting tarnished with the reputation of unreliablility.
Still, Windows seems to have come out of that ok.
Did anyone else get a MACH board for Christmas, and drool over that awful mouse?
Anyone else ever play Balance Of Power? Damn, I miss that.
Re:I see dead people (Score:4, Interesting)
Although I'm since 1979 in IT I had never before seen this stuff...
But knowing DOS and Win3.11 I managed to get it working again :)
DESQview/X (Score:3, Interesting)
DESQview/X was even cooler than DESQview, which was a remarkable piece of software.
This could display MS-DOS character cell and Windows 3.0 apps onto an X-Terminal, could run X apps locally, could display X apps from Unix onto your pc.
It was too late to market. Windows 3.11 came out soon after, with reasonable networking, and that was the end... Sadly, even the X window system is now a niche player...
Re:DESQview (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. Same here. I gave it a try, and wow was it ever bad - completely unworkable.
I never got into OS/2, having no copy available to me (I just couldn't afford it). I did my C in Borland's DOS based Turbo C++ inside DESQview and was blissfully ignorant of what life under OS/2 might be like.
By all accounts I heard soon after that time, OS/2 was a glorious thing, so I'm always mildly disappointed I missed out on it. I think I held out in DESQview land (and then Linux without X) until almost Windows 98 times.
Mondrian (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Visi On (Score:3, Interesting)
In my opinion, there was an additional reason why Visi On failed (As if there weren't enough reasons already)
Visi On used copy protection. You either had to have your original floppy disk in the drive at boot or have a genuine Visi On mouse attached (the software would check the mouse for a serial number). Now, tell me you don't see the problem with disks or mice wearing out quickly!
From a historical preservation perspective, the worst part was since few people want to preserve old software besides games, it almost "protected" itself out of existence!
Have a look at a few of them.... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a site I've enjoyed browsing for quite some time that gives small walk-throughs of the UI on many versions of different operating systems.
http://toastytech.com/guis/ [toastytech.com]
Failed To Compete With Windows (Score:1, Interesting)
--
"Geoview is a gui that runs on top of MS-DOS for low end systems. It is more of a competitive issue for Windows (and Works) than DOS
"We need data on this product ASAP, it is about to scoop Works on a major deal, in going through the mass merch channel this fall if we do not kill it have we gotten a copy of it and done any evaluation?" link [edge-op.org]
" It would great if we could get our hands on Jaguar. Joachim and Jeremy are harassing Atari and Amstrad respectively to get them to send us a copy" link [edge-op.org]
"the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity " link [edge-op.org]
"I an reading about the Gateway adoption of the Corel software. I am interested to understand what this means better and how it relates to any contracts we have with them link [edge-op.org]
Re:GEOS (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, i found it horrible. Ofcourse, I only had a joystick and games, so I wasn't really the target audience :) But in general it was excruciatingly slow, took ages to load and the interface was visually underwhelming - especially when compared to the BBC Archimedes computer you already had then.
Ofcourse, the Amiga arrived not long after :)
Brilliant computer, it wasn't until I bought a 80486DX@50 Mhz that the speed of the CPU + graphics in Windows began to match the 7.8 Mhz 86000 CPU + coprocessors from the Amiga...
Re:GEOS (Score:3, Interesting)
GEOS was a brilliant hack and probably one of the tightest pieces of code ever created. The fact that it provided a true GUI on a "toy" computer was jaw-dropping. The fact that it could do that AND even run applications (Word processing, spreadsheets, Desktop Publishing) gave it Macintosh-like functionality at 1/10th the price -- well, that was simply beyond astounding.
What a lot of people don't know is that the folks that created GEOS, Berkely Softworks, went on to recreate GEOS for the APPLE II, and then later for the PC. Retitled "Geoworks Ensemble", it gave the GUI and related apps to "low end" PC that had been abandoned by Microsoft in their bid to make Windows rule the world.
MS started to make Windows "real" by Version 3 -- but, in order to run it, you needed a 386 or better. GEOWORKS could operate on much lower-end equipment (I believe all you needed was a hard-drive, so even the 8088 CPU was possible). So, you could have the equivalent of Windows without having to buy new hardware.
And remember that a lot of people have already invested $2000 in a 286 and didn't want to give it up right away -- so GEOS got more traction than you'd think. There was also a large contingent of people with early laptops that found GEOS to be just the ticket for a black-and-white only screen and a 20mb HD with maybe 1 MB of RAM (much too small for Windows).
While aiming for the low-end gets you initial sales, aiming for the high-end turned out to be MS's path to the future, and it's been that way ever since. What MS guessed right was that the hardware would catch up with the software, and get cheap enough that you could afford to upgrade every few years.
Re:DESQview (Score:3, Interesting)
For those of us who were on the support side of things - we missed DV and DV/X too. Lots of good memories - and it's lead to me being able to explain all the VMWare stuff to coworkers and friends in a fashion that clicks a lot easier. In addition, the same problems that would cause DESQview issues are invariably the same type of stuff that showed up in VMs. The more it changes, the more it stays the same...
(formerly bryant@qdeck.com)
Re:Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
You're mixing Spanish with English? "What (que) flame bait"? Yes, your comment is, and is incorrect as well. Linux is on everything from wristwatches to supercomputers. The only place Linux isn't dominant is the desktop.
And the only reason is that Windows comes preinstalled on almost ever PC sold. No normal user is going to install an alternative OS. Hell, most people have never heard of Linux.
Re:Hard to forget hell. (Score:1, Interesting)
the Atari ST was an amazing piece of hardware, way ahead of its time, and in retrospect, I can see that it was clearly the best of the 8-bit era.
It was a 16/32 bit machine, not 8.
This was a machine with three microprocessors: one general purpose CPU and separate processors for both sound and video.
It had exactly one microprocessor, the CPU. The sound chip was an off the shelf Yamaha sound chip, a decent (by 1980s standards) tone generator chip. It was strictly a peripheral chip (i.e. incapable of doing anything complex without CPU control). As for video, most STs had just a dumb framebuffer. Later models added a blitter, which is basically a memory copy/modify/fill engine. Once again, strictly a slave to the CPU, no real intelligence of its own.
The coolest thing about the ST's hardware design was that it was the fastest of the main 3 mid-80s ~8 MHz 68000 personal computers (Macintosh, Amiga, ST). It had a DRAM controller which (IIRC) ran 2x as fast as the CPU needed it to, so that even cycles serviced the CPU and odd serviced DRAM refresh and DMA peripherals like the blitter, floppy controller, and ACSI disk interface. This meant that its CPU always ran flat out with minimal wait states, and it also had fast disk I/O. (ACSI note: it was a bit like 8-bit parallel SCSI, but without quite enough smarts to actually be SCSI. Atari STs used SCSI host adapters which attached to the ST via ACSI.)
It probably would have been vastly successful if the Atari name hadn't been so firmly associated with games.
It would have been much more successful if Atari management knew how to be a successful computer company. The ST just kind of sat there for years without any significant evolution of the platform, hardware or software.
It also didn't help that the launch hardware firmly associated itself with games by being a non-expandable keyboard wedge form factor. It wasn't until the Mega ST that they had a design suited for non-home use (and even the Mega wasn't very expandable).
Re:AmigaOS (Score:3, Interesting)
You raise some good points - both the ability to cosistently copy and paste information between different applications and unified support for a wide range of printers and other devices were the Achilles Heal of a lot of alternative operating systems back in the day.
-MT.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hard to forget hell. (Score:3, Interesting)
Jack Tramiel should be strung up for crimes against computing.
I wouldn't call them crimes necessarily. Tramiel was just misguided: He thought of computers as an extension of the calculators he made before, which were an extension of the typewriters before that. In this mindset the computer is a widget that is undifferentiated from any other, where price and distribution are all-important and the engineering details don't matter. This fundamental mistake spelled doom for Commodore, but on the other hand it made computing accessible to a huge number of people. Most people who got started with computing in the early-to-mid 1980s got their start on a Commodore computer that was probably 1/5 to 1/3 the price of anything Apple sold.
It is shocking though how little Tramiel actually understood. As when he finally realized he needed a floppy disk drive, then told his team to have the software done in a weekend! No wonder the stock 1541 was so lame.