Gary looked so happy at the end of the demo of Concurrent DOS! A man who knew exactly what the computer world wanted then and needed in the future. RIP
@@RonJohn63 I'm not sure you can justify that unless you have some data for it. Multitasking GUIs were already here by the time he developed that, sadly. So they were coming no matter what. But if he was a year earlier things could have been interesting.
@@Wizardofgosz having used concurrent "console" systems (as far back as flipping between sessions on a VT220, and then flipping between Linux console sessions), I can tell you with complete certainty that they're less useful than GUI systems. And things get worse if the DOS program just happens to use the same chord that Concurrent DOS uses for flipping between screens. Lastly... *DOS was a dead end.* It was too simple; barely more than a program loader.
At 4:45 Concurrent DOS 386. In 1988 I designed an industrial computer using C DOS 386. It communicated with an 8 bit MP/M system via bi-directional remote controlled DMA. Each computer could access the other simultaneously through the DMA channels. The 386 system ran reports and calculations based on data supplied by the 8 bit MP/M system. That MP/M system communicated with PLCs, such as one or more Allen Bradley PLC devices which controlled factory/process control systems. The factory floor data was represented by screen after screen of touch controlled graphics presenting values and states of the entire factory in real time.
Coming from the 'big end' world (VAX/VMS), a few of our clients used it with 'desktop' accounting and database packages we'd never heard of, that did everything they wanted, and we knew we had no response.
The Amiga was 3 years ahead in using multitasking but it didn't take off in the US where IBM PCs and to some extent the Macs ruled. In the US, IBM told the corporate world that a serious computer shouldn't have any features that makes it possible to run advance games. Stuff like proper audio, advanced graphics and animations didn't belong on a proper business computer. Here in Europe, especially in Sweden and Germany the Amiga was the computer to have, it was very popular among both businesses and home users.
@ Yep. Power users were looking to multi-task with Word Perfect, Word, Lotus 123, Harvard graphics, etc. Their careers depended on using these programs so there were no other options. And Mac entirely owned desktop publishing for the artsy fartsy types.
09:35 “Short-term product” that turned out to be the future of Windows. While OS/2 receded from the limelight into a niche, it was the ability to multitask existing DOS programs that really drove the marketplace to embrace Windows. GUI programs specifically written for Windows came later.
hmmm interesting me with 50 tabs of chrome opened, an android emulator, a batch downloader, a AAA game, photoshop and sony vegas running at the same time
Looking back from this age of Core i7 processors, multiple terabyte hard drives and smartphones, those computers back then were so slow and clunky. At the time, they were hot shit. Makes the mind boggle what we'll have 25 years from now.
True. But at the same time, a laptop from a decade ago has a fair chance of being able to browse the web pretty easily (say, if it's a Core 2 Duo etc), and still be pretty useful. Silicon is approaching its limit. Still... there might be some mind-blowing development, but we'll have to see.
it's mostly about power consumption / mobile devices these days. being able to squeeze as much performance as possible with as little of wattage as possible to get best battery life.
I remember working on mainframes that took up 500sqft, 96K core memory, punched cards, 20MB disk drives as big as a washing machine. Just upgraded my home PC to 12th gen intel 32GB with dual 4k monitors
1:37 Ah, ReadySetGo. I preferred that to PageMaker and QuarkXPress, because of one neat little feature: each tab stop not only had a position, it also had a width. That meant that you just had to tab while typing text, and you automatically got a block of text which had inset margins on both sides. I’ve never seen that in any other package since...
15:16 This was a sore point with other makers of Microsoft*-compatible PCs: IBM had the sole right to sell “OS/2 Extended Edition”, which came with a built-in relational DBMS, which other vendors did not. *Even back then, the standard for compatibility was not any product from IBM, but Microsoft Flight Simulator. So from very early on, it was not IBM that defined what “compatible” meant, but Microsoft.
@samwyse2006 yeah but this was America. The Amiga didn't really take off there so that may explain it. Plus they may not have been able to get anyone on board to demonstrate it.
I remember a multitasking system called VM/386 that could support multiple DOS configurations and even DOS versions simultaneously using virtual-8086 mode. It was, in a manner of speaking, Docker for DOS.
The computer mouse is an aid to making multitasking simple and easy to perform. Microsoft Windows operating system makes managing some application programs conveniently done in one computer by one user. I can still type!
15:58 “six-point-two” I believe meant “LU 6.2”, which was IBM’s standard for peer-to-peer networking. Its overall networking architecture was called “SNA”, and already went back decades by this point. But it had always been hierarchical-based, with a centralized mainframe controlling everything. But everybody else was favouring the peer-to-peer paradigm, to the point where even IBM realized it had to get in on the act.
Fucking hell! $36m from that tiny little office with 4 people? That is crazy. Spend some of it on office space ffs! (I'm literally trying to talk to people from the past telling them to do shit 🤦♂️ fml.)
Imagine a vendor ruthlessly playing down his competitors' products. "Those other systems are pathetic garbage, my company's latest version leaves them in the dust ha ha ha. IBM will be history next year." It would be such a contrast to how polite the show is. 🤣
and sometimes it was long distance to call your ISP so you'd get billed both ways, from the phone company for a long distance call and from your ISP for internet time.
I am wondering what was the model of the serial terminal used in the Concurrent DOS presentation. I've never seen the ones from the late 80s even on pictures - mostly the late 70s models.
samwyse2006 Perhaps they decided that going in to systems where multitasking was already the norm would not really bring much new information out there, and went for an episode that was not really about multitasking in general, but rather the work done to bring multitasking to platforms where this had previously been rather limited. I suspect that the relatively short time available in each episode really meant they had to limit the scope of the subjects they handled.
+samwyse2006 CC's always catered to the DOS crowd from early on, and the Mac market filled in for the ultra high income viewers. Budget viewers were not their market, with an occasional episode thrown in to show what good "gaming" computers were out to get the children for x-mas.
look closely at the parts where it showed the clock in that microsoft thing. when running in the background, the clock didnt update at all. only when they clicked on it. on a500 it could update the clock while doing other shit. fucking microsoft hogging all the attention with there stupid spread sheets
A500 was a budget system. The same price in the late 80s got you a green screen turbo XT, floppy only, with a buzzing speaker. By this time, most people were buying 80286 or 80386 class computers to do any real work on them, paired with EGA and soundblaster cards, which was easily 2-3x the price of the A500. You also didn't need a hard drive with an Amiga since the OS was partially integrated and swapping was kept to a minimum. That simply was not an option for the PC market once you got to the AT class computer, which only raised the price even higher since hard drives were so expensive then.
Most multitasking systems other than the Amiga and Unix flavours were not preemptive multitasking anyway, not even Windows NT 3.51 had proper multitasking 7 years later on when i first ran into it in 1995.
@CNVideos I wonder. I mean pretty much every expert says we're pretty much in the end times as far as moores law goes for silicon. Much of the semiconductor industry is wondering where we're going to go in the 20's.
Me from the future of your post. The answer to the question where we're going in the 20s: not far. CPUs aren't much faster than the were back at the time of your post. More parallel processing but ML is dead. Silicon is at its end. They might go smaller, this year we'll get 3nm and with ARM we got more power sufficient, Intel still uses power like there is no tomorrow 180w TP for the newest i5.
@@uriituw They split off from that to work on a new OS that was to be System 8 or 9; the Copeland system, as they referred to it. It ended up getting replaced by NextOS, with some modifications to look more like Apple's normal aesthetic. A/UX was basically a 68000 compatible UNIX System 5 kernel from AT&T, which was leaps and bounds ahead of Windows. (Windows has always been behind some how.) That was a rocky time for Apple. Steve Jobs had been ousted 3 years before and there were a lot of bad ideas during that time. A/UX was actually a good one.
chucknorris687 If I recall correctly, cooperative multitasking was already supported by existing windows programs, the new thing was that this version could use the 386s virtual 8086 mode to run several MS-DOS programs, so each of them ran as single tasking applications in a sort of virtual machine, and the multitasking support was handled by preempting the virtual 8086 task rather than the actual DOS program.
None of this is impressive to an Amiga or Unix user at the time. It’s so funny seeing the ways that IBM-PC people try to get something resembling multitasking.
Problem with Amiga was that it had no memory management nor had it programmers following standards, more than very often throwing the horrid system crashes (Guru Meditation) as if there was no tomorrow. Therefore, the Amiga could never be taken seriously... We had a 2000HD which finally worked properly around 1989... You just could never ever rely on the thing for serious applications :(
Sometimes I wonder what was wrong with people in this program. They claim to talk about computers but then instead of talking about computers they talk about "word processors" or "spreadsheets" or some times "databases". All I learned from watching Computer Chronicles is that PC had two eras, before-doom and after-doom.
You can clearly see the IBM version is the most weak of all, it looks like handle a full instruction (multiple instructions) of a program and then handle the full instruction of the next program however waits the current instruction to finish before it can handle the next instruction (causing delays because it needs to wait). That's not multitasking, thats time sharing. It is like a 8-bit Arduino, in the single core world that doesn't use interrupts and doesn't do a simple task in a short period time of attention (wrong implementation). Real multitasking is like a physical clock, every second is the same amount of time and every second needs to be the same amount of time to be accurate. If every second is attached to process, it needs to respond in a second (and not two seconds or more). When every process takes the same amount of time to do something, thats multitasking. For example, printing a character instead of a whole string (a bunch of characters). A process needs to respect the limited time to spend to do something. That's the weak point of a software solution, it is easy to abuse. However, if the OS or CPU gives you only one cycle (forces) to do something, it could be multitasking. I don't understand they explained it like this, that's why I post this explanation.
is so called multitasking overrated ? sure for multimedia but do you really need to be able to switch over from a compiler into your telephone system on one machine ? seams kinda cheap now.
the last 20-30 year of running "Insert your Pro hardware system software here" ontop of bulky buggy OS's while dealing with the OS's issues over and over. seams wasteful, it really would have been better using a custom terminal, more professional and powerful. the swiss army knife approach brought us IT calls from india, Facebook lol, all I'm saying is i hope in the future us in britian and america can find more tasteful computing options.
Gary looked so happy at the end of the demo of Concurrent DOS! A man who knew exactly what the computer world wanted then and needed in the future. RIP
Too bad he was wrong about what the computer world needed.
@@RonJohn63 How was he wrong? He was wrong that the computer world wanted multitasking?
@@Wizardofgosz he thought the computer world wanted multitasking *DOS,* when it wanted a multitasking *GUI.*
@@RonJohn63 I'm not sure you can justify that unless you have some data for it.
Multitasking GUIs were already here by the time he developed that, sadly. So they were coming no matter what. But if he was a year earlier things could have been interesting.
@@Wizardofgosz having used concurrent "console" systems (as far back as flipping between sessions on a VT220, and then flipping between Linux console sessions), I can tell you with complete certainty that they're less useful than GUI systems.
And things get worse if the DOS program just happens to use the same chord that Concurrent DOS uses for flipping between screens.
Lastly... *DOS was a dead end.* It was too simple; barely more than a program loader.
At 4:45 Concurrent DOS 386. In 1988 I designed an industrial computer using C DOS 386. It communicated with an 8 bit MP/M system via bi-directional remote controlled DMA. Each computer could access the other simultaneously through the DMA channels. The 386 system ran reports and calculations based on data supplied by the 8 bit MP/M system. That MP/M system communicated with PLCs, such as one or more Allen Bradley PLC devices which controlled factory/process control systems. The factory floor data was represented by screen after screen of touch controlled graphics presenting values and states of the entire factory in real time.
Amiga had had pre-emptive multitasking for 3 years at this point...
Concurrent DOS was a brilliant technical achievement. Microsoft and IBM couldn't get it right after about 3 years, while DRI quietly got it done.
Coming from the 'big end' world (VAX/VMS), a few of our clients used it with 'desktop' accounting and database packages we'd never heard of, that did everything they wanted, and we knew we had no response.
The Amiga was 3 years ahead in using multitasking but it didn't take off in the US where IBM PCs and to some extent the Macs ruled. In the US, IBM told the corporate world that a serious computer shouldn't have any features that makes it possible to run advance games. Stuff like proper audio, advanced graphics and animations didn't belong on a proper business computer. Here in Europe, especially in Sweden and Germany the Amiga was the computer to have, it was very popular among both businesses and home users.
Wow! :| A whole TV-programme about multitasking in 1988 and they don't even mention Amiga, the king of multitasking in that era.
exactly
@ Yep. Power users were looking to multi-task with Word Perfect, Word, Lotus 123, Harvard graphics, etc. Their careers depended on using these programs so there were no other options. And Mac entirely owned desktop publishing for the artsy fartsy types.
@@oldtwinsna8347 And the Amiga could run both IBM and Mac software. :-)
It's funny how AUX was made so people in 'all walks of life' could get into UNIX - as if everyone in 'all walks of life' could afford a Macintosh.
09:35 “Short-term product” that turned out to be the future of Windows. While OS/2 receded from the limelight into a niche, it was the ability to multitask existing DOS programs that really drove the marketplace to embrace Windows. GUI programs specifically written for Windows came later.
I have never been able to handle multiple tasks at the same time, that is why I believe that multitasking software is a wonderful thing.
I admit coming to this vid in search of comments quoting "It's All About the Pentiums"
hmmm interesting
me with 50 tabs of chrome opened, an android emulator, a batch downloader, a AAA game, photoshop and sony vegas running at the same time
Looking back from this age of Core i7 processors, multiple terabyte hard drives and smartphones, those computers back then were so slow and clunky. At the time, they were hot shit. Makes the mind boggle what we'll have 25 years from now.
CNVideos In 25 years, our current Core i7 Processors etc will look as ancient as this does to us today....
True. But at the same time, a laptop from a decade ago has a fair chance of being able to browse the web pretty easily (say, if it's a Core 2 Duo etc), and still be pretty useful. Silicon is approaching its limit. Still... there might be some mind-blowing development, but we'll have to see.
it's mostly about power consumption / mobile devices these days. being able to squeeze as much performance as possible with as little of wattage as possible to get best battery life.
@@oldtwinsna8347
That suggests a good future for ARM processor development.
I remember working on mainframes that took up 500sqft, 96K core memory, punched cards, 20MB disk drives as big as a washing machine. Just upgraded my home PC to 12th gen intel 32GB with dual 4k monitors
1:37 Ah, ReadySetGo. I preferred that to PageMaker and QuarkXPress, because of one neat little feature: each tab stop not only had a position, it also had a width. That meant that you just had to tab while typing text, and you automatically got a block of text which had inset margins on both sides.
I’ve never seen that in any other package since...
15:16 This was a sore point with other makers of Microsoft*-compatible PCs: IBM had the sole right to sell “OS/2 Extended Edition”, which came with a built-in relational DBMS, which other vendors did not.
*Even back then, the standard for compatibility was not any product from IBM, but Microsoft Flight Simulator. So from very early on, it was not IBM that defined what “compatible” meant, but Microsoft.
Minicomputer makers: Dammit, my industry is becoming obsolete 😩
2:48 This is on its own still very relevant. Many people need to be aware about stock and price at the same time.
9:37 "In the future all applications are gunna have these pull down menus" Yes they are/do.
18:30 man all that must have seemed so cutting edge and futuristic af back in the 80's.
@samwyse2006 yeah but this was America. The Amiga didn't really take off there so that may explain it. Plus they may not have been able to get anyone on board to demonstrate it.
First time seeing a jedi in a suit
I remember multitasking. I can only run 2 apps at once on a split screen on my tablet.
I remember a multitasking system called VM/386 that could support multiple DOS configurations and even DOS versions simultaneously using virtual-8086 mode. It was, in a manner of speaking, Docker for DOS.
Yep. Concurrent DOS did something similar and so did OS/2. No Microsoft OS ever did though.
The computer mouse is an aid to making multitasking simple and easy to perform. Microsoft Windows operating system makes managing some application programs conveniently done in one computer by one user. I can still type!
I found a mac in the dumpster with aux ... now I wish I kept it
When was this?
Better to leave it where it belongs
15:58 “six-point-two” I believe meant “LU 6.2”, which was IBM’s standard for peer-to-peer networking. Its overall networking architecture was called “SNA”, and already went back decades by this point. But it had always been hierarchical-based, with a centralized mainframe controlling everything. But everybody else was favouring the peer-to-peer paradigm, to the point where even IBM realized it had to get in on the act.
@chucknorris687 probably cooperative. With the exception of the Amiga pretty much all 16-bit OS that I'm aware of used cooperative multitasking.
Xenix had PMT in 1982.
bitwize
oh yeah i forgot about UNIX systems. that's why i said pretty much. i knew i'd forgotten something
Fucking hell! $36m from that tiny little office with 4 people? That is crazy. Spend some of it on office space ffs! (I'm literally trying to talk to people from the past telling them to do shit 🤦♂️ fml.)
Imagine a vendor ruthlessly playing down his competitors' products. "Those other systems are pathetic garbage, my company's latest version leaves them in the dust ha ha ha. IBM will be history next year." It would be such a contrast to how polite the show is. 🤣
did the IBM OS2 sql demo display all of the staff and their salaries? I wonder if that was real data, or just mock.
I remember Internet being charged by the minute.
and sometimes it was long distance to call your ISP so you'd get billed both ways, from the phone company for a long distance call and from your ISP for internet time.
I am wondering what was the model of the serial terminal used in the Concurrent DOS presentation. I've never seen the ones from the late 80s even on pictures - mostly the late 70s models.
@SteelRodent Thank you!
TeleVideo 905
@@straightpipediesel thank you!
IBM picked the wrong DOS. Crony transaction with MS???
9:01 and this is the moment when everyone realized Microsoft had left IBM in the dust.
Is the terminal vt100? Or pc term emulation?
11:30 - the clock is still running, holy sh1t! lol
Crashintosh users were amazed.
5:39 Note how he said PC-DOS instead of MS-DOS...
"The clock is still running!"
Err.. no. It's not.
Not much has changed with Windows over the last... few years.
Zero mention of Amiga I guess. There was a dedicated episode of the Amiga 2000 the same year, but still.
samwyse2006 Perhaps they decided that going in to systems where multitasking was already the norm would not really bring much new information out there, and went for an episode that was not really about multitasking in general, but rather the work done to bring multitasking to platforms where this had previously been rather limited.
I suspect that the relatively short time available in each episode really meant they had to limit the scope of the subjects they handled.
+samwyse2006 CC's always catered to the DOS crowd from early on, and the Mac market filled in for the ultra high income viewers. Budget viewers were not their market, with an occasional episode thrown in to show what good "gaming" computers were out to get the children for x-mas.
look closely at the parts where it showed the clock in that microsoft thing. when running in the background, the clock didnt update at all. only when they clicked on it. on a500 it could update the clock while doing other shit. fucking microsoft hogging all the attention with there stupid spread sheets
A500 was a budget system. The same price in the late 80s got you a green screen turbo XT, floppy only, with a buzzing speaker. By this time, most people were buying 80286 or 80386 class computers to do any real work on them, paired with EGA and soundblaster cards, which was easily 2-3x the price of the A500. You also didn't need a hard drive with an Amiga since the OS was partially integrated and swapping was kept to a minimum. That simply was not an option for the PC market once you got to the AT class computer, which only raised the price even higher since hard drives were so expensive then.
Most multitasking systems other than the Amiga and Unix flavours were not preemptive multitasking anyway, not even Windows NT 3.51 had proper multitasking 7 years later on when i first ran into it in 1995.
Windows 386? Damnnnn
i was 13 at the time, i feel so old.
@4:37 That's how it starts... the automation of people's jobs and livelihoods.
35 years later and we are still using these spreadsheets lol
@CNVideos I wonder. I mean pretty much every expert says we're pretty much in the end times as far as moores law goes for silicon. Much of the semiconductor industry is wondering where we're going to go in the 20's.
Me from the future of your post.
The answer to the question where we're going in the 20s: not far.
CPUs aren't much faster than the were back at the time of your post. More parallel processing but ML is dead. Silicon is at its end. They might go smaller, this year we'll get 3nm and with ARM we got more power sufficient, Intel still uses power like there is no tomorrow 180w TP for the newest i5.
An Apple system based on Unix... that'll never last... (Obvious sarcasm)
It didn't tho
Moskito, just FYI, MacOS has been UNIX-based since MacOS 10.0 was released in around 2000.
A/UX is what macOS ought to have been.
@@uriituw They split off from that to work on a new OS that was to be System 8 or 9; the Copeland system, as they referred to it. It ended up getting replaced by NextOS, with some modifications to look more like Apple's normal aesthetic. A/UX was basically a 68000 compatible UNIX System 5 kernel from AT&T, which was leaps and bounds ahead of Windows. (Windows has always been behind some how.)
That was a rocky time for Apple. Steve Jobs had been ousted 3 years before and there were a lot of bad ideas during that time. A/UX was actually a good one.
Now was windows 386 preemptive or does it use cooperative multi tasking?
chucknorris687 If I recall correctly, cooperative multitasking was already supported by existing windows programs, the new thing was that this version could use the 386s virtual 8086 mode to run several MS-DOS programs, so each of them ran as single tasking applications in a sort of virtual machine, and the multitasking support was handled by preempting the virtual 8086 task rather than the actual DOS program.
Cooperative for Windows apps, preemptive for DOS tasks.
None of this is impressive to an Amiga or Unix user at the time. It’s so funny seeing the ways that IBM-PC people try to get something resembling multitasking.
And here I thought obnoxious Amiga users went away.
Problem with Amiga was that it had no memory management nor had it programmers following standards, more than very often throwing the horrid system crashes (Guru Meditation) as if there was no tomorrow. Therefore, the Amiga could never be taken seriously... We had a 2000HD which finally worked properly around 1989... You just could never ever rely on the thing for serious applications :(
@@lindaoffenbach I don’t buy that.
I remember getting Quarterdeck not long after this and thinking this is the bees knees!.haha😜
Serious multitasking on a Unix system originating from mainframes... me pulling out my phone...
Now all opreting system multitasking
@3:35 thats a multi-user sir, not a multitasking, i hope you read this and know your mistake, lol
actually that is both. multiuser access to multiple applications running at the same time. As multiuser and multitasking as it can get!
Dave Jaworski
Sometimes I wonder what was wrong with people in this program. They claim to talk about computers but then instead of talking about computers they talk about "word processors" or "spreadsheets" or some times "databases". All I learned from watching Computer Chronicles is that PC had two eras, before-doom and after-doom.
I hadn't even heard the term Multitasking until 1995.
The Mac monitors were so tiny multitasking was pointless anyway.
You can clearly see the IBM version is the most weak of all, it looks like handle a full instruction (multiple instructions) of a program and then handle the full instruction of the next program however waits the current instruction to finish before it can handle the next instruction (causing delays because it needs to wait). That's not multitasking, thats time sharing. It is like a 8-bit Arduino, in the single core world that doesn't use interrupts and doesn't do a simple task in a short period time of attention (wrong implementation).
Real multitasking is like a physical clock, every second is the same amount of time and every second needs to be the same amount of time to be accurate. If every second is attached to process, it needs to respond in a second (and not two seconds or more). When every process takes the same amount of time to do something, thats multitasking. For example, printing a character instead of a whole string (a bunch of characters). A process needs to respect the limited time to spend to do something. That's the weak point of a software solution, it is easy to abuse.
However, if the OS or CPU gives you only one cycle (forces) to do something, it could be multitasking. I don't understand they explained it like this, that's why I post this explanation.
You have to understand that the knowledge on the subject was kind new at time.
Dave is my cousin.
Stew's hairdo is horrible this time
Thank goodness people get hair cuts now. 13:05 nasty wig.
is so called multitasking overrated ? sure for multimedia but do you really need to be able to switch over from a compiler into your telephone system on one machine ? seams kinda cheap now.
the last 20-30 year of running "Insert your Pro hardware system software here" ontop of bulky buggy OS's while dealing with the OS's issues over and over. seams wasteful, it really would have been better using a custom terminal, more professional and powerful. the swiss army knife approach brought us IT calls from india, Facebook lol, all I'm saying is i hope in the future us in britian and america can find more tasteful computing options.
Multitasking : music plays while you have image editing program and www browser and a word processor. (and 50 tabs open in browser)