Dvorak Uncensored » Whatever Happened to IBM’s TopView? — Another installment for you.
Among the wacky flops of the ’80s, one of wackiest was TopView, from IBM. Released in August 1984, TopView was going to set the world on fire. At least that’s what the boosterism which permeated the computer magazines said.
In short, the $149 TopViews was mostly a clunky task-switcher with some multitasking capabilities. Worse, the DOS commands that could run within TopView were limited to a select group of officially approved DOS 2.1commands (MS-DOS 3.1 would be released that November). To further thicken the mud, TopView refused to run DOS batch files because it intercepted nearly all DOS interrupts.
TopView’s design sparked wild speculation about an IBM hidden agenda.
…ahh, reminds me of good old DESQview/QEMM – the only true way of monitoring your RemoteAccess + FrontDoor BBS setup.
Those were the days 😀
I really liked the first Desqview when it was just an application switcher — then they really blew it when they tried to become an OS (or whatever it is they tried to do.)
You know which pseudo-OS I liked from that era?
GeoWorks.
That was a great program and probably worthy of a “whatever happened to” article.
I did a little research — they lost me with “DesqviewX”.
What, nobody misses good, ole Sidekick?
Digital Research’s Concurrent DOS was a very capable product in 1985. If they had sold it at the same price as TopView…, but instead AFAIR, it was over $300. Real-time stock market analysis and charts (with trades coming in every second) on an 80286 !
Close to a decade later, versions of DR-DOS claimed to be full pre-emptive whatever, but in fact DR had turned off that part of concurrency. If they were trying to protect their Concurrent DOS market, I don’t think the strategy worked!
From fairly early days (DOS 2 or 3), DOS had task switching and a clipboard through TSRs.
#4… Sidekick was great! I had almost totally forgotten about it.
I’m not sure which I find more remarkable — all the amazing stuff we did with 64K and a 10MB hard drive or how little extra we’ve really gotten from all this amazing computer power we have now.