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.
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