/vr/ - Retro Games

I used IBM PC DOS for a while in the 90's. Couldn't really tell much difference from MSDOS 5 or 6.22, but I didn't do much batch programming. Most of my coding back then was with Turbo Pascal. And for freeing up memory, I used QEMM, which worked great most of the time. Also used Desqview so I could code in one virtual screen and also hang out on IRC (dialed in via QModem Pro). Actually on the Unix shell account I was also running GNU Screen, so could check my mail with Pine, use FTP and Lynx, etc. That was a really great setup back then, before I finally took the plunge and installed Linux.

Heck, I even tried out Desqview/X, but it wasn't much use for me other than having the option to display several DOS Windows side-by-side. I guess it made a lot more sense if you wanted to run Unix X11 clients remotely, but I was happy with my text-mode stuff (that's back when most web sites worked fine in Lynx, and gopher sites were common...)

Some years later, tried out Caldera DR-DOS 7. Again, I couldn't tell much difference, but by that time I was only booting to DOS to run some games, so didn't take advantage of its multitasking abilities. It was nice though, because their installer had an "optimized for gaming" option that tried to free up as much memory as possible in the base 640K.

Apparently Novell Netware (which I think has its own version of DOS?) was used for quite some time even after Win95/98 were pretty much ubiquitous.