The joy of discovering on old hard drives not only a forgotten piece of software which the Internet has no trace of ever existing, but actually two different versions of it!
@vwestlife You should definitely consider uploading this to the archive.org.

@vwestlife

John Poole? Wonder if he is related to John Poole of King Henry VII's court/the Pooles of Maryland.

@vwestlife and to think, we could be using Operating System/5 11 today xD
@vwestlife Is it 40% as much of an OS as OS/2?
@vwestlife i'm fascinated by this one, partly because there's absolutely no mention of john poole software, or OS/5 Desktop in the usenet archives. i imagine this was a piece of... shareware? freeware? distributed on BBSes in the 90s?
@vga256 It was shareware, distributed on CompuServe. $20 to register.
@vwestlife ah haaa. wonderful to see this survive, thank you.
@vwestlife You are living the dream! 😌 Sometimes I'll find something obscure but it's something that's archived *somewhere*...
@vwestlife That looks like it was written in Visual BASIC for DOS. The Windows-like user interface, the menus, the message box and even the color dialog are all built into VBDOS so you could easily write a program that could be compiled to a DOS application or a Windows (3.1) application. Great stuff for 1993!
@vwestlife
It was updated to support ultra wide screens. πŸ“Ί
🀣
@vwestlife i guarantee you this is more or less a toy that someone whipped together in VBDOS 1.0

i did that exact thing and it looked nearly identical
@linear @vwestlife Maybe, but it still deserves to be archived.
@bizzl @vwestlife of course, i wouldnt suggest otherwise
@vwestlife I tried it the night you sent it to me and just found it a little... strange 😁
@vwestlife yeah OK but does it have TSRs?
@vwestlife My old hard drives have been dismantled and destroyed (except for the one still in the queue). Too much PII on them.
@vwestlife For appropriate values of graphic.
@vwestlife Definitely have not heard of this one. Do you plan on putting out more information and/or the archives?
@vwestlife I didn’t use OS/5 until after the Warp edition came out.
@vwestlife this looks like one of those old dos menu systems like QMENU, a kind of proto text-gui for benighted users back in the dark ages of dos. Many people were trying to make a buck with these things when they weren't trying to do it with Clipper apps.