Technologies We're Glad Are Dead
It's easy to cry over the products we loved and lost. But let's take time to appreciate the many ways in which technology really has improved, and the many geeky things we no longer need to worry about.
Single-Tasking Operating Systems
The culprit: Early PC operating systems weren't capable of running multiple processes. You could do one thing at a time - just one. If you had Lotus 1-2-3 loaded, you had to save the spreadsheet and exit before you could start up another application. This was not because programmers were dumb (mainframes, minicomputers and Unix knew about multitasking, thanks for asking) but because PC hardware resources were so limited.
The computer industry responded to the "one thing at a time" limitation in several ways, including tools that permitted task switching and rudimentary multitasking. The first of these was Borland's Sidekick, a TSR utility that, with a couple of key presses, popped up a calendar, text editor and calculator on top of whatever application you were running. Truly, this was a revolutionary improvement for the IBM PC. Within a few years you could find all sorts of unlikely tools running as TSRs.
Later efforts emphasized task switching, so you could load up multiple applications and swap between them. These utilities, such as IBM TopView, Quarterdeck's DESQview and early Windows versions, managed software in a round-robin approach that swapped memory and data as fast as it could. Sometimes they even worked, though you had to pity any Windows 2.x user who wanted to download a file on a telecom connection while she worked on another tool.
Why it was such a pain: The base operating system was still designed to run a single operation at a time, so any "solution" was inherently a patch. As a result, the computer bucked like a manual transmission car with a driver's ed student at the wheel. Everything needed to be tuned or the PC would freeze or lose data. This made people cranky.
DOS TSRs were notorious for their inability to Play Nice With Others. You might assign them to a particular region in upper memory, but they wouldn't stay where they belonged; "memory conflict" was a phrase to which everyone grew accustomed. These tools often had memory leaks, which meant frequent reboots and mysterious crashes.
To solve that problem, vendors created configuration files to control what loaded where, in what order, with what options. I learned to dread Anything.INI and Whatever.SYS, which would be peppered with arcane commands to load drivers, utilities and fonts, and, I think, make your laundry extra-bright white.
Why it disappeared: The hardware finally caught up, and operating system providers soon followed suit with software.
IBM OS/2 1.0 might have required 24 diskettes to install and 8 MB of RAM to load, but it really did multitask. So did Xenix (80 diskettes required, and if you messed it up, you started all over again). One could argue about when the industry truly made the jump to multitasking (much beer has been consumed in the pursuit of that argument); I'm just glad it did.
