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Switchable desktops were designed and implemented at Xerox PARC as "Rooms" by D.A.
Henderson and Stuart Card in 1986[1] based upon work by Patrick P. Chan in 1984. This work
was covered by a US patent[2].

Switchable desktops were introduced to a much larger audience by Tom LaStrange in swm (the
Solbourne Window Manager, for the X Window System) in 1989. ("Virtual Desktop" was
originally a trademark of Solbourne Computer.)[3] Rather than simply being placed at an x, y
position on the computer's display, windows of running applications are then placed at x, y
positions on a given virtual desktop ³context´. They are then only accessible to the user if that
particular context is enabled. A switching desktop provides a way for the user to switch between
"contexts", or pages of screen space, only one of which can be displayed on the computer's
display at any given time.

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Other kinds of virtual desktop environments do not offer discrete virtual screens, but instead
make it possible to pan around a desktop that is larger than the available hardware is capable of
displaying. This facility is sometimes referred to as panning, scrolling desktops or viewport. For
example, if a graphics card has a maximum resolution that is higher than the monitor's display
resolution, the virtual desktop manager may allow windows to be placed "off the edge" of the
screen. The user can then scroll to them by moving the mouse pointer to the edge of the display.
The visible part of the larger virtual screen is called a viewport.

implementation

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The first platform to implement multiple desktop display as a hardware feature was Amiga 1000,
released in 1985. The Amiga moved on to succeed in the consumer and video production market.
All Amigas supported multiple in-memory screens displayed concurrently via the use of the
graphics co-processor, AKA the "Copper". The Copper was a simple processor whose operations
waited for a screen position, wrote to hardware registers (including display memory fetch
position), conditionally skipped an instruction, or performed No OPeration [NOP]. Using the
GUI implemented in system ROM API's, programs could transparently display multiple
independent screens, from non-consecutive memory, without moving the memory. This
hardware-based scrolling does not use blitting, but something more like what is sometimes called
hardware panning. The video output is simply told (once, or many times) where to display
(scanline) and from what screen memory address. A screen can move to any position, or display
any portion, by modifying the wait, or fetch position. Typically a single byte value. The
Copperlist did need to be sorted in vertical and horizontal wait position in order to function.
Note: See http://www.faqs.org/faqs/amiga/books/ for a list of reference material.

Each desktop or 'screen' could have its own colour depth (number of available colours) and
resolution, including use of interlacing. The display chipset ('graphics card' on a PC) could
switch between these desktop modes on the fly, and during the drawing of a single screen,
usually with three pixel deep line between each desktop shown on the screen. However, if one
interlaced (flickering) desktop was displayed, all desktops onscreen would be similarly affected.

Some programs, VWorlds (an astronomy simulator) being an example, used the multiple
desktops feature to overlay a set of controls over the main display screen. The controls could
then be dragged up and down in order to show more or less of the main display.

In 1988 with the release of the Amiga A2024[4] monitor which added Amiga a vast choice of
displaying various high-resolutions and in addition with Amiga graphic cards resolutions on
which to run a Higher Resolution Workbench Desktop. Previous version only supported PAL or
NTSC display modes.







Almost all Unix-like systems use the X Window System to provide their windowing
environment.

The X Window System is unique in that the decoration, placement, and management of windows
are handled by a separate, replaceable program known as a window manager. This separation
allowed third-party developers to introduce a host of different window manager features,
resulting in the early development of virtual desktop capabilities in X. Many of today's X
window managers now include virtual desktop capabilities.

Configurations range from as few as two virtual desktops to several hundred. The most popular
desktop environments, GNOME and KDE, use multiple virtual desktops (two or four by default).
Some window managers, like FVWM, offer separate "desks" that allow the user to organize
applications even further. For example, a user may have separate desks labeled "Work" and
"Home", with the same programs running on both desks, but fulfilling different functions. Some
window managers such as dwm support "tagging" where applications can be configured to
always launch on a particular, named desktop, supporting automatic organization and easy
navigation.



[

IBM's personal computer OS/2 operating system included multiple desktops (up to 4 natively) in
the OS/2 Warp 4 release in 1996.




Microsoft Windows does not implement virtual desktops at installation time. Historically video
card implementors have provided this functionality, such as Nvidia's nView product.

Currently, Microsoft offers a utility called Desktops which allows users running Windows XP or
Windows Server 2003 or later operating systems to run applications on up to 4 virtual
desktops.[5]

Microsoft had previously provided a Virtual Desktop PowerToy (for Windows XP [1]), a
software-based virtual desktop manager, which simulates many desktops, by minimizing and
maximizing windows in groups, each group being a different desktop. However, the
functionality provided is less comprehensive than that of many other virtual desktop solutions
(e. g. maintain a window in a given desktop even when its application bar button flashes, etc.).
Application compatibility problems are common, because application developers do not expect
virtual desktops to be in use on the Windows platform.

Users of Microsoft Windows can use third-party software for advanced virtual desktop
visualization, such as 3D virtual desktop managers that emulate some of the eye-candy features
available on Compiz.

Many desktop shell replacements for Windows, including LiteStep, bblean, GeoShell, SharpE,
Emerge Desktop and others, support virtual desktops via optional modules.

Are you required to use  and wish you had the multiple desktop capability of ?
Now you can organize your  desktop with up to 20 customizable, virtual desktops
using a free utility called 

. We briefly mentioned this software in our article 99 of the best
Windows freeware programs you may not know of. In this two-part series, we will go through
the different features of the program and how to use them.

Download 

from http://www.dexpot.de/index.php?id=download.

Once you have installed 


and run the program, an icon displays in the system tray.
Switching to Another Virtual Desktop

To see how virtual desktops work, we will start by switching to another virtual desktop. There
are three ways to do this.

Switching Desktops Using the Menu

Before switching desktops, open some programs, so you can see the effect of switching desktops.
The initial desktop is 

 when the program is first installed. Therefore, any programs
you open before switching desktops for the first time, are on 

.

Once you have some programs open, right-click on the 


icon in the system tray to activate
the pop-up menu. The currently active desktop has a check mark to the left of the desktop name.
As an example, select 

 from the upper section of the pop-up menu.

You will notice the open programs disappear, including the taskbar buttons. Any programs or
windows you open while on 

 only display when 

 is the active desktop. Open
a program on Desktop 2. Now, switch back to 

 and you will see the programs on


 become available again.

Switching Desktops Using the Desktop Manager

You can also switch desktops using the 



. Right-click the Dexpot system tray
icon and select 


 from the pop-up menu.
The 


 displays in the lower, right corner of the screen. The currently active
desktop is outlined in the 


. To switch to 

 using the 



, just click on the icon labeled ³´ on the manager.

To access the menu for the 



, right-click on any empty space on the 



. You can close the 


 using this menu by selecting !
from this
menu.
You can make the icons on the 


 smaller using the "
#
option.

You can add a button that allows you to access two options quickly by selecting the "

!$

 option. Initially, when 


is first installed, the two actions that can be
performed using the additional button are to view the %!!&#



 (single-click) and to
3!!
 (double-click). The options available on this additional button can be customized in
the settings, discussed later in this post.

Use the "#'#


 option to display the icon for the active program for each
desktop on the 


 instead of the default computer icon. This allows you another
quick way to see which desktop you want, by seeing which program is active on each desktop.
What is virtual desktop?

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) A virtual desktop is an individual user's interface in a virtualized environment.The virtualized

desktop is stored on a remote server rather than locally.

Desktop virtualization software separates the physical machine from the software and presents an
isolated operating system for users. Desktop virtualization tools include Microsoft Virtual PC,
VMware Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac.

The benefits of desktop virtualization include:

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Knowledge workers who use mostly business software applications are good candidates for
desktop virtualization. The model is not generally viable for users with high resource demands.