🚀 go-pugleaf

I recently got windows 386 running on an IMB model 80.  Even with
the horsepower of the model 80, Windows is still pokey at times.
One thing windows 386 does do is to manage extended memory quite
nicely.  The model 80 I am using is equipped with 6 megabtyes of
memory.  When I run noton's SI from an interactive command.com
window, it reports 5.5 meg of *expanded* memory are free.  Thus
windows is automattically converting the system's extended memory
into the more dos-usable expanded memory through emulation.  Neat
trick.

The multitasking aspects of windows 386 do work.  Some nasty things
like Lotus 1-2-3 or most any grphics program (windows paint
excepted) must be run in "exclusive" mode that essentially puts
everythig else away while they run.

The renering of text into the VGA display is reasonably quick, and
is much, much better than the excuse of a windowing system in
windows 1.03.  The resizing of windows is rather klutzy compared to
systems like the Commodore Amiga or the Apple Macintosh.  The most
obvious thing missing is a "depth arranger" on the window that
makes it easy to move what's on the top of the pile to the bottom.
the Amiga's way of doing that is much more elegant -- probably
copyright -- and why windows doesn have it.  There is a zoom box
that lets one iconize a window and send it to an icon row at the
bottom of the desktop -- this is the easiest, if not most elegant
way to quickly get to the bottom of the pile of a bunch of windows.
on the screen.  One other feature that the Amiga has that is not on
the Macintosh or windows 386 are screens that can be rolled down
like window shades.  Windows related to specific projects can be
attached to separate screens on the Amiga, thus making life easier
when several projects each have several windows open.

Windows multitasking is reasonably quick until an application
starts doing disk I/O, then things rapidly fall apart.  I wrote
some batch files that used a c program to generate ridiculous
newspaper headlines.  The batch file was intentionally designed to
use the disk a lot.  I could really only run three background task
command.com windows running the batch program before the system
bogged down and got difficult to control.  For contrast, I ran the
same "benchmark" on my AT&T Unix PC (10 MHz, 16 bit, 2 meg versus
the IBM with 32 bit, 16 MHz, 6 meg).  I was careful to construct a
Bourne shell script that thrashed the disk similarly to the msdos
batch script.  The Unix PC also used bit-mapped windows with text
renering.  The Unix PC does have a simpler job since its screen is
about 700 * 380, whereas the VGA screen is 640 * 480.  VGA is also
color, while the Unix PC is a monochrome display.  The Unix PC
running 3 windows generating headlines was able to geneate about
four times as many per second as the windows 386 system.  I also
was running an online telecom session on a second virtual console
on the Unix PC.

Speed comparisons between the Unix PC rendering text and windows
386 were nearly equivalent, if the program running didn't need to
access the disk.  Obviouly the inefficient file system design of
msdos shows itself quite nicely here.  I wonder if OS/2 is going to
be dogged by similar crummy disk performance since it also uses the
same old msdos file structure.

One thing that windows 386 gets you that OS/2 does not is the
ability to run several current generation msdos applications at
once.  For instance, I was able to run two Turbo C compile sessions
from TC's integrated environment.  I suppose I could have run more,
but I didn't feel like trying it.  OS/2 is only going to be able to
run one current generation msdos application at a time in the
"compatiblity box" (recently re-named "compatibility window").  I
guess they felt "box" sounded sexist -- like they prefer "planar"
rather than "motherboard".  OS/2 will run multiple OS/2
applications, of course.

I think some of the Unix based DOS merge products may be the answer
for people that want to run simultaneous msdos appplications, for
these will be able to map the msdos file system onto the unix file
system.  Since I haven't seen any of the Unix 386 DOS merge
products I can't really honestly comment yet.

To sum up, windows 386 is probably worth the bucks, if one has an
appropriately beefy 386 system.  I wouln't try to run it with less
than 4 megabytes of memory aournd.  That is, presuming that you
want to take advantage of the multitasking capabiltiies -- which at
the current time are main reason for having windows 386 around.

--Bill