Re: Workstation Aesthetics

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=&amp=&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.