Comments on: SoftWindows on OpenVMS

By: Peter Godwin

Peter Godwin — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 04:48:59 +0000

There’s a screenshot of Quorum in Byte (1994-01) : https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1994-01_OCR/page/n193/mode/2up – the thing I think is somewhat interesting is that it isn’t just a emulated frame buffer, but actually tries to use the host’s native controls.

By: Peter Godwin

Peter Godwin — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 04:45:48 +0000

Equal from Quorum and Liken from Xcelerated Systems inc are two other obscure emulation systems I’d be interested in finding one day.

By: tenox

tenox — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:19:57 +0000

In reply to crazyc.

I personally like the brown theme of DECwindows quite a lot. Also a fun fact that DECwindows before Motif was a little bit of a hotdog itself: https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/Digital/timeline/photos/decwindows.jpg

By: Stephen Ferrell

Stephen Ferrell — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:10:10 +0000

I love these dives into old operating systems and emulation on obscure hardware. I was using DEC MicroVAX II’s back in the early 1990’s and your forays bring back a lot of long-forgotten memories. It’s also amazing to recall how many industry giants from that time have fallen by the wayside and are essentially unknown now to current IT professionals. I had a cousin who worked for DEC back in its dying days and the layoffs at the time were simply stunning. I can remember him telling me about 20,000-40,000 person layoffs at a time and DEC went thru several rounds of such layoffs before finally throwing in the towel. DEC and many other long-dead giants just weren’t prepared for the PC and its many clones.

By: crazyc

crazyc — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 17:59:29 +0000

Decwindows is so brown. Windows 3.1 hotdog stand theme looks better.