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
johng · 11h ago
Same experience here. It blew my mind but it wasn't really useable.
ivolimmen · 9h ago
... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS
snvzz · 3h ago
Last I checked (easily been a decade) it had a major limitation in not supporting Unicode.
I wonder if this was ever resolved.
JdeBP · 1h ago
It seems to have supported UTF-8 for at least a decade. Although it went the full-on ECMA-35 route of making that an optional switchable character set.
There was an issue back in 2016 where, ironically, it was coming up in Latin-1 mode with everything else around it talking UTF-8, and there have been other similar impedance mis-matches over the years. But they seem to hinge on it actually having UTF-8 support.
I've been using Twin as my everyday terminal emulator and terminal multiplexer since ~2000,
slowly adding features as my free time - and other interests - allowed.
As someone pointed out, the look-and-feel reminds Borland Turbo Vision.
The reason is simple: I started writing in in the early '90s on DOS with a Borland C compiler, and I used the Borland Turbo Vision look-and-feel as a visual guideline (never actually looked at the code, though).
The porting to linux happened in 1999 (it was basically dormant before that),
and Unicode support was progressively added around 2015-2016 (initially UCS-2 i.e. only the lowest 64k codepoints, then full UTF-32 internally, with terminal emulator accepting UTF-8). There are still some missing features, most notably: no grapheme clusters, no fullwidth (asian etc.) support, no right-to-left support.
Right now I'm adding truecolor support (see https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor) - it's basically finished, I'm ironing out some remaining bugs, and thinking whether wire compatibility with older versions is worth adding.
And yes, documentation has been stalled for a very long time
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
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
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...
Likewise for the Televideo 995-65: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021
IIRC there was some additional minimal runtime stuff like perl/awk/sed that came with it kinda like MinGW later on
I wonder if this was ever resolved.
There was an issue back in 2016 where, ironically, it was coming up in Latin-1 mode with everything else around it talking UTF-8, and there have been other similar impedance mis-matches over the years. But they seem to hinge on it actually having UTF-8 support.
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/4
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8
However: There was no 256 colours support as of 2021.
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/30
And in some places it even required IBM code page 437.
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/22
And some of the doco seems to have never been incorporated.
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/100
I've been using Twin as my everyday terminal emulator and terminal multiplexer since ~2000, slowly adding features as my free time - and other interests - allowed.
As someone pointed out, the look-and-feel reminds Borland Turbo Vision. The reason is simple: I started writing in in the early '90s on DOS with a Borland C compiler, and I used the Borland Turbo Vision look-and-feel as a visual guideline (never actually looked at the code, though).
The porting to linux happened in 1999 (it was basically dormant before that), and Unicode support was progressively added around 2015-2016 (initially UCS-2 i.e. only the lowest 64k codepoints, then full UTF-32 internally, with terminal emulator accepting UTF-8). There are still some missing features, most notably: no grapheme clusters, no fullwidth (asian etc.) support, no right-to-left support.
Right now I'm adding truecolor support (see https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor) - it's basically finished, I'm ironing out some remaining bugs, and thinking whether wire compatibility with older versions is worth adding.
And yes, documentation has been stalled for a very long time