I'd like to think it'd have had some subtantial tracktion back in the day, being able to overlay your work windows 3.1 machine with BSD. It has some DDE exchange I haven't tried to use yet, but it'll talk to Excel, so imagine having snmpwalk scripts to poll networks and do real-time excel graphs!? It'd have been awesome.
lproven|2 years ago
It was horribly unstable and crashed if you gave it a nasty look. Running BSD binaries on top would give the unpleasant combination of an unstable GUI with weak multitasking, on a primitive OS, plus hard-to-use unfriendly binaries.
Not a winning combination.
To me, it sounds like MachTen on Classic MacOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen
BSD in a window on an OS with no good multitasking, virtual memory, or networking.
So, it lets you do stuff the host OS couldn't otherwise do, but it doesn't mean it does it well -- because it doesn't.
scruffyherder|2 years ago
Yes I too was doing IT in the mid 90's and did far more than my share of widnows 3.1 with win32s.
If you'd looked into bow it hooks all the timers from dos, and can happily run more than one thing at a time, and preempt them.
It's a winning combination for sure, even on my lowly 386 DX 16, I can run word, excel & bow at the same time. It's great!