🚀 go-pugleaf

Peter da Silva (peter@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM) wrote:
: Apple and Commodore managed to do GUIs that didn't require 120 MHz Pentiums
: to get decent performance. AmigaOS did useful real-time multitasking on a
: 7 MHz 68000 with 512K RAM. MacOS ran in 128K.

In the 1980's Tandy Corporation developed a graphical interface entitled 
'DeskMate'.  A quasi-GUI that could task switch, use a common interface, 
and run on 8088 machines quite decently.  In fact, on a 80286 it screamed.

They spent years developing it, had major software companies writing for 
it (Lotus, Broderbund, PFS, Norton) and was selling it like hotcakes with 
its Tandy line of Personal Computers in the late 1980's and very early 
1990's.

Then Windows came out in the early 90's and DeskMate was dead.  They had 
everyone convinced they needed this bloated shell and that developers 
should write EXCLUSIVELY for Windows.

Tandy lost many developers, and eventually gave up on DeskMate in 1992.  
Today, thousands of people still use DeskMate, and there are a few of us 
developers of the good ol' days still out there.

It's a shame what Microsoft has done to computer users.

RLS
 --
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Robert L. Stinnett, c592073@showme.missouri.edu, StinnettR@aol.com    |
| University of Missouri - Columbia, USA - Computer Science             |
| Member of the Harper Valley, P.T.A.    <-------+      +---------------+ 
| Programmer, Consultant, Analyst, Developer     |      | Tandy DeskMate|
| Web:  http://www.missouri.edu/~c592073         +------| Developer,    |
| Maintainer of ftp://musie.phlab.missouri.edu/pub/trs  | Independent   |
|   -- an ftp site for Tandy PC files.                  | IS Consultant |   
+-------------------------------------------------------+---------------+