Mail Archives: djgpp/2011/09/05/00:43:48
John Wright writes:
> None taken. I'm just having a good time revisiting some of the old
> stuff that I put on the shelf 20 years ago. Back then, I bought
> DV/X and found it pretty useless and incomplete.
Hm. What did you miss?
I bought DESQview in about 1989, very soon upgraded to DESQview/X, got
into the Quarterdeck beta program, and never regretted any of it. It
was far more stable than Windows or even DOS alone, despite providing
true multitasking, and most programs for X compiled under DJGPP
without code changes (of course often file names ran into the 8.3
restriction). Even Ghostscript "just worked" (after we fixed a couple
small bugs in the file access interface). And the Windows-based X
servers I tried were *awful*, until Cygwin. They concentrated on
Windows compatibility (CUA cut/copy/paste and availability of the
admittedly very nice fonts bundled with Windows, for example) but
display tended to glitch, or even crash Windows. DV/X was a far
superior alternative to Windows, for me, and I couldn't afford a Sun.
I'm pretty sure DJGPP usage with DESQview goes back to 1990 or so,
because I believe I was building Darryl Okahata's port of Emacs with
it before I moved to Japan in March 1990, and then started building
GNU Emacs with the NEmacs and MULE patches by mid 1991. Most DJGPP
programs compiled out of the box and ran faster on DV/X than on DOS or
Windows until DJGPP 2.0 (QEMM386 did a better job of handling extended
or expanded memory than Microsoft's drivers did, but evidently DPMI
was a good enough standard that once you got into protected mode the
callbacks into DOS were equally efficient for all vendors' DPMI
hosts).
Unfortunately, after I moved to Japan I ran into a nasty user-level
problem (DV/X's font cache was too small to handle more than one
Japanese font at a time), and then when my "toy" webserver became
something a bit more important than that in '95, "more stable that
Windows" just didn't cut it. So I moved fulltime (and, as it turned
out, permanently) to Linux for OS stability. Even with that said,
DV/X just worked in Japan with all the user applications I needed,
including NCSA Mosaic with the L10N patch (as long as I didn't try to
use more than one Japanese font at a time :-).
BTW, Quarterdeck knew about the font cache problem, but they didn't
own the X server, they had licensed it "as is" from a third party
(they were working on their own, they said, for release in DV/X 2.1 or
2.2 at the latest ... that never happened :-( ).
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