X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f X-Recipient: djgpp AT delorie DOT com From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" To: "John Wright" Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Are Xlib and Xaw it QDLIB200? In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 8.1.93a under 21.5 (beta31) "ginger" 17bcc2aab111 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:51:29 +0900 Message-ID: <87zkijioby.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk John Wright writes: > None taken. I'm just having a good time revisiting some of the old > stuff that I put on the shelf 20 years ago. Back then, I bought > DV/X and found it pretty useless and incomplete. Hm. What did you miss? I bought DESQview in about 1989, very soon upgraded to DESQview/X, got into the Quarterdeck beta program, and never regretted any of it. It was far more stable than Windows or even DOS alone, despite providing true multitasking, and most programs for X compiled under DJGPP without code changes (of course often file names ran into the 8.3 restriction). Even Ghostscript "just worked" (after we fixed a couple small bugs in the file access interface). And the Windows-based X servers I tried were *awful*, until Cygwin. They concentrated on Windows compatibility (CUA cut/copy/paste and availability of the admittedly very nice fonts bundled with Windows, for example) but display tended to glitch, or even crash Windows. DV/X was a far superior alternative to Windows, for me, and I couldn't afford a Sun. I'm pretty sure DJGPP usage with DESQview goes back to 1990 or so, because I believe I was building Darryl Okahata's port of Emacs with it before I moved to Japan in March 1990, and then started building GNU Emacs with the NEmacs and MULE patches by mid 1991. Most DJGPP programs compiled out of the box and ran faster on DV/X than on DOS or Windows until DJGPP 2.0 (QEMM386 did a better job of handling extended or expanded memory than Microsoft's drivers did, but evidently DPMI was a good enough standard that once you got into protected mode the callbacks into DOS were equally efficient for all vendors' DPMI hosts). Unfortunately, after I moved to Japan I ran into a nasty user-level problem (DV/X's font cache was too small to handle more than one Japanese font at a time), and then when my "toy" webserver became something a bit more important than that in '95, "more stable that Windows" just didn't cut it. So I moved fulltime (and, as it turned out, permanently) to Linux for OS stability. Even with that said, DV/X just worked in Japan with all the user applications I needed, including NCSA Mosaic with the L10N patch (as long as I didn't try to use more than one Japanese font at a time :-). BTW, Quarterdeck knew about the font cache problem, but they didn't own the X server, they had licensed it "as is" from a third party (they were working on their own, they said, for release in DV/X 2.1 or 2.2 at the latest ... that never happened :-( ).