[fpc-devel] Multithreading under DOS

[Travis Siegel]

Vmix was an excellent multitasker.  Recently, it's been (partially)  
released as opensource, though it's nowhere near as complete as the  
old shareware product was.  Vmix operated by the simple expedient of  
creating a virtual 8086 machine for each simultaneous program the user  
wished to run.  It worked very well, and I'm honestly surprised it  
didn't get more usage than it did.  Something like that would be  
perfect for a multitasking/multithreading dos.  I believe this is the  
approach early versions of windows used (pre 3.0 maybe?) It obviously  
doesn't solve everything, but if someone were to write such a thing,  
and modify the underlying dos implementation to match, you could quite  
reasonably create a multitasking/multiuser version of dos that was  
probably 60-70 percent compatible with existing dos apps.  It'd be a  
fun project, though I'm sure my assembly skills aren't up to the task.