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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Workstation Aesthetics
Date: 26 Jun 2024 01:17:19 GMT
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On Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:19:07 -0400, Andrzej Matuch wrote:

> I remember hearing about DESQview when I was talking to a BBS's SysOp
> back in 1991 when I knew nothing about computers. I was curious as to
> why they would sacrifice using their computer to make others happy. He
> pointed out that he wasn't; he ran the BBS in one window and went on
> with his day in another. At the time, the thought that someone could do
> that seemed so futuristic to me.

There were TSRs like Borland Sidekick that were more popular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick?amp=&=&=

You could do interesting things with DOS and there were some strange 
things that came out of the design. They uses a 8253 programmable interval 
timer for various things. Channel 0 was IRQ-0 and provided a 55 msec tick. 
No great planning there. They needed a 3.579 MHz frequency for the NTSC 
color burst so it would work with a TV, divided that by 3 and fed it to 
the PIT. The larges number you could load into the hip was 0xFFFF and it 
would generate the interrupt when it rolled over. 

As an aside, a lot of things used 3.579 crystals since they were dirt 
cheap. 55 msec is rather slow so you could load another value to get a 10 
msec interrupt but then you had to do the math in the interrupt handler to 
simulate the original 55 msec or things got wonky.  If you were trying to 
do something like a Morse code trainer it got interesting.

iirc channel 3 of the PIT was wired to the onboard speaker. That meant you 
could screw around with than to get interesting sound effects like falling 
bombs or machine guns. 

Some BIOSs used this feature to play Beethoven's 'Für Elise' just before 
the CPU melted down.

The 386 took a lot of fun out of life. It wasn't as easy to screw around 
with the hardware. There is a parallel to cars. Other than CAIs and cat 
backs which may of may not do anything messing with a modern car isn't 
easy without screwing it up entirely.