> Sure would've been nice if the Desqview engineers and the GEM guys could've merged their efforts...

OMG yes. I thought this myself at the time.

The thing is that they were rivals.

QEMM386 bolted protect-mode memory-management on top of DOS. DESQview bolted multitasking on top of QEMM. DESQview/X bolted a Unix-like GUI on top of that.

DR just sold multitasking OSes for the PC: Multiuser DOS for use with terminals, FlexOS with X/GEM for realtime stuff.

Symantec bought Quarterdeck. Perhaps Novell should have bought it first.