Project sounds interesting. The company website is profoundly strange. https://meanhamster.com/products The active products seem to be this and 3d printed pet sculptures from photos.
Clicking through and looking up on Wikipedia, Mean Hamster has been a niche game studio for decades (pocket pc, amiga, retro Atari cartridges). Also it’s now purely a family operation with all people who don’t have the same last name as the CEO marked as former team members.
Dude is in his 50s now, so maybe he’s working with his family on a cool project and living his best life, I like that interpretation.
I also tried the CONNECT application, and that was not getting further than “_” blinking. I will try using MODE as as you said. Also the documentation is patchy, cause I’m not sure, as you again pointed out, if CTTY can even do what I’m asking of it. My next step will be to get a CF card to IDE converter card and install either, DOS 6.5(along with PROCOMM) or freeDOS or ELKS and try to reestablish connection.
I think you might need to use the MODE command to set the COM port up prior to use.
Also I’m less sure about this part, but I think CTTY is only useful if you are using the pi as the user terminal (since I think it stops DOS from using the screen/keyboard and redirects that to/from the serial port)? I don’t know what programs come on that supplemental disk, but depending on your comfort level, you could create a simple terminal emulator with a batch file, debug.exe, or potentially basic (if that’s included). In a pinch, you might also be able to copy an ascii file from the pi to the luggable over the com port (copy.exe COM1 localfile)/(cat remotefile > /dev/ttyS0). You could also encode a binary file as base64 and then use a simple basic program to decode it?
For reference, I’m just a few years older than this thing 😁 and maybe my old brain is misremembering things…
That’s rough, but they haven’t updated the product pages either:
We visited the U.S. distributor’s The A1200 product page on Amazon.com and saw that the machine is still up for pre-order at $189.99 at the time of writing. However, the release date hasn’t yet been updated; it still says “June 16, 2026” is when The A1200 will become available.
I preordered from the official RGL website the day they went live and this is the first I’m hearing about it. Pretty shitty that they haven’t even bothered to send an email and I have to learn about it through social media.
it was very, very nice and really fast, especially if you actually were running it on a BeBox. sadly, there was barely any software beyond some really nice audio production software.
Apple got very very close to licensing it for OS X to replace their aging Macintosh System Software, but they went with NeXTSTEP instead.
You point is right, but the example is not correct.
All languages such as C/C++ are reliable, and way more efficient with ressources. The environment to make simple software such as we browser or text editor are incredibly big. Firefox on a random front page took 300M ram. Same web browser and text editors used to run on 64Mb ram. Same need, a lot more efficiency
However, in tech we are used to be blind to the work needed to carry one one technology. Banks have dedicated firms to keep COBOL running and update it with everything that was missing back in time. Techbros make shit, true. But there is no magical technologies, only workers
This rumor persists for so long. I’ve been in tech for now twenty years, and juniors say this all the time. Also, I’m hired to replace archaic code with modern equivalents, so my perspective is one from the other side.
A few key things I discovered:
Companies that need devs of an archaic language are extremely rare. I’m talking about like you won’t see it on job boards until they already have 1-2 people in mind already.
Usually the people they hire have been doing only that for years. Usually retired computer scientists or professors.
The pay isn’t high at all. I remember seeing a position that needed THIRTY years, and their offer was nice, but low on the tech side. I made double the salary. If you work at META or Alphabet, you’ll be making 4-6 times as much.
Finally, those archaic systems get forced into retirement. Yes, there are still integrated systems like ATM and missiles or whatever that use these languages.
But that’s so extremely rare that they’re still being maintained. Because companies will allocate a budget to have some dipshit programmer like me come in, rewrite the functionality in whatever language (the last one I did was a interface from a PoS system to a web application, which I did in PHP), and then throw away the old code because ain’t nobody want to fix that.
Rewriting existing systems is one of the riskiest things a company can do, so old codebases are going to be around for a long time.
Those old COBOL codebases likely contain 50 years of bug fixes for every possible edge case. It’d take a long time to rewrite everything and ensure feature parity, and there’s usually not a significant business reason to rewrite it (after all, a successful end result is just that the system behaves exactly the same as the old one).
Almost a full day was devoted to agreeing to name the standard “Small Computer System Interface”, which Boucher intended to be pronounced “sexy”, but ENDL’s Dal Allan pronounced the new acronym as “scuzzy” and that stuck.
You can get custom stickers. There are lot of suppliers and they are not expensive, even for small quanitities. You can also get stickers to print on your inkjet
However: Those logos are not vinyl stickers, they are printed on. You might want to take a look at those transparent transfer stickers people are using for their model planes or research how those custom lego printing places are doing it
That’s not a bad idea. I do know someone with a laser cutter, actually. And I’m sure my wife has those colors in her over 700 bottle collection of polishes.
Yeah, I definitely meant M575. I mis-typed it in one spot. Just fat lingered. I guess I should have specified that I also want the solution to be cheap. Preferably sub-$20.
If I were doing it, I would try to find someone with a laser cutter, make a stencil of the logo, and use it to apply paint (or fingernail polish) directly to the device. I suppose there might even be a custom stencil service out there somewhere.
Yes, it absolutely does. They don’t get to leave the series on a cliffhanger for nearly 20 years and not get called out. What happened to my little gnome dude after we launch that spaceship?!
They really don’t make games like this anymore, and I put 100% of the blame on Half-Life. Before Half-Life, shooters were going all in on being “immersive sims.” Then Half-Life came out and showed you can use linear set pieces in a FPS to tell a mediocre story and people, for some reason, will absolutely love it.
This website could be quite possibly the best sites I’ve seen in years. No crazy ads and other junk, just black and white text nearly organized and photos. Wish all sites looked like this. simplicity at its best!
After I finished restoring the IBM 2168 486 DX2-66MHz (my childhood dream DOOM PC), there was another box that I wanted to check. Released in June 1996, Quake received many updates to ride the triple technological shock-wave of the late 90s. Originally a DOS, software rendered, LAN oriented game, Quake transitioned to Windows with winquake, gained 3D hardware acceleration with vquake/glquake, and got a dedicated deathmatch fork with QuakeWorld (qwcl/qwsv).
This is an era that I completely missed when I was a teenager because I did not have the money to upgrade my PC. On top of that, France only really got access to the Internet many years later, in 1999, when AOL came with its 99 Frcs/monthly unlimited plan. Here is the story of my “Quake PC”, built thirty years later.
It was a dream of mine for some of the classics to be rebenched using era-appropriate hardware and modern methods. Going over by impactful config variables with screenshots to compare renderers was a cherry on top.
I’d totally forgotten this trick - I used to use this when I was a kid after I heard about it. Was never quite sure if it was real because I remember also later being told to use it in Win 98 too and it didn’t do anything afaik.
This is for !retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org . You install this in a retro PC where a physical drive would go. Your retro PC thinks your disk images are actual disks, and everything else works like it used to. It’s a nice quality-of-life improvement.
Retro game consoles have been doing this for a while. The Sega Dreamcast’s GD-ROM drive is prone to failure, so modders replace it with hardware that loads disk images. I haven’t heard of this for retro PCs before, but it makes sense.
Because you have it reversed. This is new tech trying to interface with old tech. For when your Pentium 2 CD-ROM drive dies because a belt went bad. Or the laser is rotten. That kind of situation. Sourcing an IDE drive for old hardware is getting harder every day. (honestly, finding anything beige is getting harder)
In old computers, CD audio worked by physically connecting an audio cable between the optical drive and the sound card. PC emulators can emulate this, but it’s more complicated for CD emulators running on a real computer.
Modern CPUs are pipelined, meaning that the clock signal doesn’t have to propagate across the entire chip each tick. Instead the subsections act like a bucket brigade, with each one handing the results of the partially completed work to the next stage.
There is a limit to how small these subsections can be practically made due to pipeline length and the formation of “bubbles” on instruction branching that take time to clear. Eventually the cost of these bubbles outweighs the gains made from more pipeline stages.
So, if a 6502 or a Z80 were smaller than a single pipeline stage in a modern processor it could potentially have an even higher clockrate, albeit while doing massively less work per clock cycle. Though thermals might be a bottleneck before clock propagation is. Very small but extremely hot spots can be a problem in modern CPU design, with parts of e.g. the ALUs rising to unacceptable temperatures even as all the silicon around them is relatively cool. IIRC some Intel CPUs actually have instructions that are only able to be executed a limited number of times per second for this reason.
So an extremely small, extremely fast/hot 6502 might not have a much faster clockrate than a modern chip.
I watched the video of him designing the replacement. The labor put in to the design work and prototyping was easily multiple thousands of dollars. Not super practical for most people. I’ve been 3D printing for years and can design and print things for myself but the level of expertise that when into this case is another level. It would have taken me multiple years to get to a similar point.
Just knowing you can actually fix something so completely destroyed is reassuring. Time was not kind to the plastics of a lot of 70s and 80s tech pieces, especially depending on how and where they were stored.
I’m worried I’m going to pick up one of my computers one day and the whole thing will just crumble. So knowing that this is even possible is wonderful.
On THAT note, I should probably look into 3D or resin printing.
Originally ZFS could not be a boot disk because of the license issue. There was some other important feature that was denied to linux users, originally (forgot what it was). Apparently the booting restriction was eventually overcome. I don’t really grasp how the licensing changed that made booting possible.
Conceptually ZFS was relatively superior to all other filesystems. If it’s fully liberated, I don’t get why it is not more popular. I might expect it to be a default of sorts when installing Debian.
It would work fine without Cloudflare. The server is running the current version of OpenBSD, so it could be configured to safely host a website without any tunnels.
I have one as well, mothballed, which is why the article caught my attention. Then I saw all the mention of Cloudflare and thought: oh fuck, so it needs a wheelchair with a mouth joystick, in effect.
What originally attracted me was running a full-blown ZFS, which was too license encumbered to be fully featured in linux or bsd, IIRC. I never got around to doing much with it. And now I wonder if ZFS is finally fully liberated on a FOSS platform.
Nope, it was slow to load and use compared with text-based software for doing the same thing back in the day. An Amstrad PCW was better for actual work
was it though? I guess it depend on having a mouse, a second floppy drive and a printer. You could thus use it as a desktop publishing platform, or spreadsheet calculator.
Lots of info and screenshots to browse through there. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for you might find something else that’s interesting :)
Correct, yes (I meant the ‘D’ evenwicht said they recalled it starting with if that wasn’t clear, indeed for Digital Research, in fact I had to look up DR-DOS to remember the name ViewMAX).
I thought your question was clear for what it’s worth. If it was Windows 3.0 era you’re probably looking for ViewMAX (from the same company as DR-DOS, which was an MS-DOS compatible operating system, maybe that’s where the ‘D’ comes from?). I vaguely remember reading (or maybe watching) a good feature about it online a while ago but I can’t find it unfortunately.
RetroFed
Project sounds interesting. The company website is profoundly strange. https://meanhamster.com/products The active products seem to be this and 3d printed pet sculptures from photos.
Clicking through and looking up on Wikipedia, Mean Hamster has been a niche game studio for decades (pocket pc, amiga, retro Atari cartridges). Also it’s now purely a family operation with all people who don’t have the same last name as the CEO marked as former team members.
Dude is in his 50s now, so maybe he’s working with his family on a cool project and living his best life, I like that interpretation.
@rimu@piefed.social is this your community ?
Oh that’s cool it came with an XT-IDE controller, I don’t think the dual floppy models came with one stock, will definitely save ya some hassle.
I think you’re right, trying to get the storage working would be less painful than a serial link bootstrap. Will cross my fingers for ya!
I also tried the CONNECT application, and that was not getting further than “_” blinking. I will try using MODE as as you said. Also the documentation is patchy, cause I’m not sure, as you again pointed out, if CTTY can even do what I’m asking of it. My next step will be to get a CF card to IDE converter card and install either, DOS 6.5(along with PROCOMM) or freeDOS or ELKS and try to reestablish connection.
That looks terrible for your neck. Aesthetically beautiful though.
I think you might need to use the MODE command to set the COM port up prior to use.
Also I’m less sure about this part, but I think CTTY is only useful if you are using the pi as the user terminal (since I think it stops DOS from using the screen/keyboard and redirects that to/from the serial port)? I don’t know what programs come on that supplemental disk, but depending on your comfort level, you could create a simple terminal emulator with a batch file, debug.exe, or potentially basic (if that’s included). In a pinch, you might also be able to copy an ascii file from the pi to the luggable over the com port (copy.exe COM1 localfile)/(cat remotefile > /dev/ttyS0). You could also encode a binary file as base64 and then use a simple basic program to decode it?
For reference, I’m just a few years older than this thing 😁 and maybe my old brain is misremembering things…
Not to give out to much personal information. But that thing is either as old as me or a few years older. And it is probably in better shape than me.
Love to see these things working after all this time!
That’s rough, but they haven’t updated the product pages either:
I preordered from the official RGL website the day they went live and this is the first I’m hearing about it. Pretty shitty that they haven’t even bothered to send an email and I have to learn about it through social media.
I still miss my minidisc player
So far I’ve left roses (at bottom of pages about individual services/products) for Google Reader & Angelfire/Tripod
And now we entered the “no affordable memory at all” era.
Safe mode
Oh, wow… Packard Bell Navigator…
it was very, very nice and really fast, especially if you actually were running it on a BeBox. sadly, there was barely any software beyond some really nice audio production software.
Apple got very very close to licensing it for OS X to replace their aging Macintosh System Software, but they went with NeXTSTEP instead.
You point is right, but the example is not correct. All languages such as C/C++ are reliable, and way more efficient with ressources. The environment to make simple software such as we browser or text editor are incredibly big. Firefox on a random front page took 300M ram. Same web browser and text editors used to run on 64Mb ram. Same need, a lot more efficiency
However, in tech we are used to be blind to the work needed to carry one one technology. Banks have dedicated firms to keep COBOL running and update it with everything that was missing back in time. Techbros make shit, true. But there is no magical technologies, only workers
This rumor persists for so long. I’ve been in tech for now twenty years, and juniors say this all the time. Also, I’m hired to replace archaic code with modern equivalents, so my perspective is one from the other side.
A few key things I discovered:
Finally, those archaic systems get forced into retirement. Yes, there are still integrated systems like ATM and missiles or whatever that use these languages.
But that’s so extremely rare that they’re still being maintained. Because companies will allocate a budget to have some dipshit programmer like me come in, rewrite the functionality in whatever language (the last one I did was a interface from a PoS system to a web application, which I did in PHP), and then throw away the old code because ain’t nobody want to fix that.
Linux is glamorous.
While what’s said here is true, it can also be said about old cast iron pipes or 50s brick buildings with bitum and asbestos, and such.
Do they though…? I’m not sure they do.
DOGE tech bros HATE this one thing…
This is one of the reasons COBOL programmers get paid extremely well. Nobody is learning it anymore and these people are critical if an issue occurs.
Rewriting existing systems is one of the riskiest things a company can do, so old codebases are going to be around for a long time.
Those old COBOL codebases likely contain 50 years of bug fixes for every possible edge case. It’d take a long time to rewrite everything and ensure feature parity, and there’s usually not a significant business reason to rewrite it (after all, a successful end result is just that the system behaves exactly the same as the old one).
The COBOL language is still getting updates, too.
Truly, “Will It Zork” was ahead of its time
ed is available on all modern unix-like oses, you can try it 😉 Vi inherit his modal system from ed
I am aware (even though I’ve only ever used nano), I am refering to the way the in which it was used.
ed is the standard text editor.
The text editor sounds crazy to use.
Wouldn’t it be easier to buy a USB DAB adapter/dongle compatible with android?
You remember correctly, but also
Wikipedia
Why not get a modern scanner that scans higher resolution? Just wondering what this does better.
I remember it being pronounced “skuzzy”
Thank you!
That really looks awesome :)
I think I might just skip the whole logo thing. The red ball is enough to make me happy. It’s gorgeous.
There are two things to consider:
That’s not a bad idea. I do know someone with a laser cutter, actually. And I’m sure my wife has those colors in her over 700 bottle collection of polishes.
Yeah, I definitely meant M575. I mis-typed it in one spot. Just fat lingered. I guess I should have specified that I also want the solution to be cheap. Preferably sub-$20.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=custom+stickers
If I were doing it, I would try to find someone with a laser cutter, make a stencil of the logo, and use it to apply paint (or fingernail polish) directly to the device. I suppose there might even be a custom stencil service out there somewhere.
Yes, it absolutely does. They don’t get to leave the series on a cliffhanger for nearly 20 years and not get called out. What happened to my little gnome dude after we launch that spaceship?!
Half-Life doesn’t deserve this slander.
They really don’t make games like this anymore, and I put 100% of the blame on Half-Life. Before Half-Life, shooters were going all in on being “immersive sims.” Then Half-Life came out and showed you can use linear set pieces in a FPS to tell a mediocre story and people, for some reason, will absolutely love it.
Thief and Thief II remain some of my most nostalgic PC games ever.
Ouch that’s a lot of flex. Worried it won’t hold up to long term use by heavy handed typists.
Yeah that just looks cheap to be honest. I would not be happy with that at all.
Modern Vintage Gamer did a video. His clear model flexed and his beige one did not.
Personally, I don’t think flexing is acceptable either, as the original never did that, at least none of the many I’ve used.
I need video of this in action!
This website could be quite possibly the best sites I’ve seen in years. No crazy ads and other junk, just black and white text nearly organized and photos. Wish all sites looked like this. simplicity at its best!
I loved this, thank you.
It was a dream of mine for some of the classics to be rebenched using era-appropriate hardware and modern methods. Going over by impactful config variables with screenshots to compare renderers was a cherry on top.
I’d totally forgotten this trick - I used to use this when I was a kid after I heard about it. Was never quite sure if it was real because I remember also later being told to use it in Win 98 too and it didn’t do anything afaik.
I remember wanting one of these when they came out. Alas i had no money at 12 yo.
For those who are interested, check out the interview with Stewart on the Floppy Days podcast https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-78-interview-with-stewart-chefeit-computer-chronicles
He will be missed. His positive impact in the world cannot be overstated.
I learnt of his shows through the Old Timey Computer Show.
I’ve spent many hours with Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe episodes running on my second monitor from that stream.
RIP Stewart.
Well I made that too! And it’s only a few days old.
That’s a wonderful effort. Thanks for creating it! Wasn’t aware of computerchronicles.tv
rip king
We’ve turned his website into a memorial.
https://www.cheifet.com/
core memory unlockedEdited with the link to their website, according to the FAQ
So it sounds like it could be coming, plus it’s open source so you or someone else could modify the enclosure print to be bigger
I wish it took up a 5in slot if it’s meant to replace optical drives.
This is for !retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org . You install this in a retro PC where a physical drive would go. Your retro PC thinks your disk images are actual disks, and everything else works like it used to. It’s a nice quality-of-life improvement.
Retro game consoles have been doing this for a while. The Sega Dreamcast’s GD-ROM drive is prone to failure, so modders replace it with hardware that loads disk images. I haven’t heard of this for retro PCs before, but it makes sense.
Because you have it reversed. This is new tech trying to interface with old tech. For when your Pentium 2 CD-ROM drive dies because a belt went bad. Or the laser is rotten. That kind of situation. Sourcing an IDE drive for old hardware is getting harder every day. (honestly, finding anything beige is getting harder)
In old computers, CD audio worked by physically connecting an audio cable between the optical drive and the sound card. PC emulators can emulate this, but it’s more complicated for CD emulators running on a real computer.
Hmm, I think Windows and most Linux distros support mounting disk images directly at this point.
Literally just
Right-click -> MountI’m not sure why you’d bother writing the disk image to an SD card and then using this hardware to mount it.
They’re scared of them
Why can’t emulators handle them?
Well, only 6.25 MHz… when the W65C02 can run up to 14 MHz and when CPUs stopped measuring the clock speed in MHz decades ago…
But it’s a nice retrocomputer.
This reminds me of https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502pc/open-source-hardware
( https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502/open-source-hardware )
The link doesn’t work 🤷♂️
I guess the project is this.
Modern CPUs are pipelined, meaning that the clock signal doesn’t have to propagate across the entire chip each tick. Instead the subsections act like a bucket brigade, with each one handing the results of the partially completed work to the next stage.
There is a limit to how small these subsections can be practically made due to pipeline length and the formation of “bubbles” on instruction branching that take time to clear. Eventually the cost of these bubbles outweighs the gains made from more pipeline stages.
So, if a 6502 or a Z80 were smaller than a single pipeline stage in a modern processor it could potentially have an even higher clockrate, albeit while doing massively less work per clock cycle. Though thermals might be a bottleneck before clock propagation is. Very small but extremely hot spots can be a problem in modern CPU design, with parts of e.g. the ALUs rising to unacceptable temperatures even as all the silicon around them is relatively cool. IIRC some Intel CPUs actually have instructions that are only able to be executed a limited number of times per second for this reason.
So an extremely small, extremely fast/hot 6502 might not have a much faster clockrate than a modern chip.
Apparently https://hackaday.io/project/204693-worlds-fastest-commodore-pet-using-the-mcl65 is a drop-in chip running at 900mhz.
I watched the video of him designing the replacement. The labor put in to the design work and prototyping was easily multiple thousands of dollars. Not super practical for most people. I’ve been 3D printing for years and can design and print things for myself but the level of expertise that when into this case is another level. It would have taken me multiple years to get to a similar point.
Just knowing you can actually fix something so completely destroyed is reassuring. Time was not kind to the plastics of a lot of 70s and 80s tech pieces, especially depending on how and where they were stored.
I’m worried I’m going to pick up one of my computers one day and the whole thing will just crumble. So knowing that this is even possible is wonderful.
On THAT note, I should probably look into 3D or resin printing.
true
Originally ZFS could not be a boot disk because of the license issue. There was some other important feature that was denied to linux users, originally (forgot what it was). Apparently the booting restriction was eventually overcome. I don’t really grasp how the licensing changed that made booting possible.
Conceptually ZFS was relatively superior to all other filesystems. If it’s fully liberated, I don’t get why it is not more popular. I might expect it to be a default of sorts when installing Debian.
Yeah, sun did some really cool stuff towards the end. ZFS, zones, SMF. I always liked their ALOM lights out management too. RIP sun.
My file server uses zfs on Linux.
As the other commenter says, GPL somewhat disagrees with the license. It flips the taint flag on the Linux kernel too.
I tried btrfs, but it’s not ready IMHO.
Calm down dude, don’t crucify the guy just because he doesn’t want to directly expose his server to the outside.
it’s just GPL that’s incompatible with ZFS’s CDDL. FreeBSD has ZFS support built in (OpenZFS). Linux is also supported by OpenZFS.
It would work fine without Cloudflare. The server is running the current version of OpenBSD, so it could be configured to safely host a website without any tunnels.
I have one as well, mothballed, which is why the article caught my attention. Then I saw all the mention of Cloudflare and thought: oh fuck, so it needs a wheelchair with a mouth joystick, in effect.
What originally attracted me was running a full-blown ZFS, which was too license encumbered to be fully featured in linux or bsd, IIRC. I never got around to doing much with it. And now I wonder if ZFS is finally fully liberated on a FOSS platform.
I have one of those in my loft. Used to use it for OpenBSD development.
Nope, it was slow to load and use compared with text-based software for doing the same thing back in the day. An Amstrad PCW was better for actual work
was it though? I guess it depend on having a mouse, a second floppy drive and a printer. You could thus use it as a desktop publishing platform, or spreadsheet calculator.
Geos was great on the C64, but completely useless, lol
I didn’t know there was a PC version!
O, wow, ViewMaxx… I had completely forgotten that.
Sure would like to get a collection of this stuff and run in a VM just for fun.
HP had an internal system just to make a simple GUI in DOS, forget what it was called. Just gave you buttons for a dozen programs.
You might be talking about the DOS Shell. A pseudo graphical file managerm shipped with DOS.
A great resource when looking for older GUI shells/OS’s is Toastytech: http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
Lots of info and screenshots to browse through there. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for you might find something else that’s interesting :)
Correct, yes (I meant the ‘D’ evenwicht said they recalled it starting with if that wasn’t clear, indeed for Digital Research, in fact I had to look up DR-DOS to remember the name ViewMAX).
Oh Trumpet something… The hell of getting a stack back then
WinSock Trumpet (yea, that was on Win 3.1)
Haha
Digital Research DOS, of my memory is right
I thought your question was clear for what it’s worth. If it was Windows 3.0 era you’re probably looking for ViewMAX (from the same company as DR-DOS, which was an MS-DOS compatible operating system, maybe that’s where the ‘D’ comes from?). I vaguely remember reading (or maybe watching) a good feature about it online a while ago but I can’t find it unfortunately.
hence the single quotes.. i was just pullin a jeopardy
You may be thinking of DesqViewX:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1990s
Edit for a little personal anecdote: ran a 2-line (2400, then later 14.4k) WWIV BBS under this on a 386sx in the 90s. What an awesome time that was.
DOS Shell was something like that. Not much in the way of functionality, but it was graphical…ish.
The first computer my dad bought, back in the late ‘80s, was mostly a DOS machine that also came with a mouse-driven GUI called GEM.
I don’t know if it ran on top of DOS, though. It booted directly from its own set of disks.
ViewMAX or GEM. Both from Digital Research.
DOS Shell?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell