IBM TopView?

[hunterjwizzard]

Random headcannon got me reading about IBM TopView, and now I am curious. What hardware would I need to boot this natively? It fascinates me.

 

[Chuck(G)]

As I recall, TV was shown running on a PC XT, but could take advantage of the features of the 5170. It was text-mode (aside from a very rarely used graphics mode) and used PC-DOS/MS-DOS of the era (3.3 would probably be optimal). MDA, CGA, EGA should work. It was a bit of a letdown--think MS-DOS 4.0 MT.
Of course, a hard disk is necessary; I'm not even sure that a mouse is required.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Would something like a NuXT 8088 be able to do it?

 

[jafir]

Here are the system requirements from my copy:

 

[krebizfan]

I tried looking up if IBM did a VGA compliant upgrade to TopView but couldn't find one. TV should work in text mode even with the NuXT's SVGA mode but you might be the first to try. Be bold; be prepared to fail.

Note that TV is a challenge to use without a mouse. The keyboard commands are unusual and some keyboards don't send the correct signals. Pressing the Home provides the same result as a left click. This is different from any other PC software. Read the manual for more.

TV has very little memory to load multiple programs in. The results with DesqView were a lot better. According to reviews, Omniview was also better but that was purchased by MS so the TopView compatibility layer could be shoved into Windows.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Failure is always an option!

But I haven't actually got a NuXT to try it with just yet.

 

[SomeGuy]

Topview does not support PS/2 mice (it does not use DOS mode mouse drivers). Supposedlly there was an update to add support, but as far as I know it is not out there anywhere.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Did not realize that TV could swap to floppy. That must have been a real hoot.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I'm starting to see why TV was mentioned in an article on "Failed graphical interfaces".

 

[Chuck(G)]

Originally, TV wasn't graphical. Text mode.

 

[krebizfan]

Originally. TV was a planned mainframe interface. IBM did show off some interesting graphical applications, sort of prototype multimedia projects, created in a later revision of the TV code never released to the public.

TV hit the same problem that the other multi-taskers that tried putting DOS applications in a window: not that many applications were useful in the smaller amount of screen space. Even fewer, considering the limited memory available without EMS support.

If you decide to develop applications for TV, I should point out that DesqView simplified the whole saving memory when conducting a context switch process. TV required apps to save manually their video state; DV did all that automatically.