On Mon, 24 Jul 2023 at 22:23, Jim Hall via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> I'm also not clear on the use case of a DOS GUI these days. If you're > going to use a GUI on DOS, then you need apps to run in it. Otherwise, > it's a beautiful file manager and DOS app launcher that uses a bunch > of memory. That is... a strange perspective to me. I am not going to say it is wrong, but it seems very odd, IMHO. For me, when I worked with, supplied and supported DOS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chronology went like this: [1] I started my 1st job in 1988 about when MS-DOS 3.3 came out. My employers mainly sold IBM PS/2 boxes and most of them had 1MB of RAM. MS or PC DOS 3.x couldn't use that, but PS/2 machines came with a software disk cache that could use extended memory. It made DOS and DOS apps a lot faster. We wrote menu systems for users to launch apps in DOS batch files, because we couldn't supply shareware with them and DOS had nothing built in,. [2] DOS 4 came along. It was a memory hog, but it had big-disk support (over 32MB) and DOSShell, so it caught on. DOSShell was *much* better than batch files, and quicker and easier too. It also obviated the need for things like Xtree for file management. DOSShell, like most other DOS menu apps, could swap itself out of memory so it only took a tiny bit of space, like a single-digit number of kB. Nobody minded that. [3] Windows 3.0 started to catch on. That meant HIMEM.SYS and XMS as standard; LIM-spec EMS started to fade. Apps like 1-2-3 r3 used DOS extenders routinely. Memory management really got important but everyone was buying 386SXs so you could sell them QEMM even if they didn't want Windows. [4] DR-DOS 5 bundled the memory management of QEMM and for a while it sold really well, even for people who did want Windows. [5] MS-DOS 5 copied all the good bits from DR-DOS 5, and DOSShell got even better. Now it did task swapping: you couldn't multitask, but you could pause any standard DOS app, switch back to DOSShell, *and launch a new app*. Anyone who wasn't booting straight into Windows, and who still used DOS apps, I configured the PC to boot straight into DOSShell instead. I made menu entries for all their DOS apps, and one for Windows 3.x too. [6] By 1993-1994 most PCs booted straight into Windows 3.1 but I made launchers for their DOS apps in Program Manager, and in the background, I hand-optimised their RAM with EMM386.EXE so there was lots of free RAM for those big power-user DOS apps. Then Win95 came along and it all went away. :-) I didn't care because I'd switched to NT 3 at work and OS/2 2 at home. But for me, having a good menu-driven app-launcher (*and switcher!*) built in was one of the biggest things built in from the time of PC-DOS 4 and soon after MS-DOS 4. MS-DOS 5 made it better. MS-DOS 6 consolidated that. But for 3 consecutive DOS versions, it was a standard feature, and I used it on basically all the DOS computers I deployed to customers, many hundreds of them. > Years ago, I thought DOS GUIs were interesting. I liked that folks > were writing GUIs like SEAL and oZone, and continuing to work on > OpenGEM. But of those, only OpenGEM really has much application > support. Even so, there aren't many GEM apps to run in it. But there > are a ton of regular DOS apps. The thing is this, IMHO. There are 2 conflicting goals here: [a] a GUI that has its own GUI apps [b] a good app launcher and file manager that doesn't try to be a GUI GEM is a good low-end GUI and it has apps. It's not a great DOS app launcher. DOSShell was a great DOS app launcher and file manager, but didn't have apps. I liked DOSshell a lot. I am surprised there's no FOSS equivalent in FreeDOS. There's some part-implemented clone whose name I forget but it doesn't work and I was surprised it was in there. There are some unfinished but ambitious ones like Ozone and Seal. I had problems with 'em and I don't see the point. Drop 'em. There is FreeGEM which is pretty good and it'd do, but it's misconfigured. There's ViewMax which is a passable launcher and file manager. I don't think it's included on the Bonus CD or in FDIMPLES, but it is FOSS. But there is this outlier, which is a pretty good launcher, and a pretty good file manager, and it's FOSS now. So I'd concur, overall: drop Ozone and SEAL and any partial/incomplete/non-working others. Maybe keep FreeGEM as an option, but fix it. But now there is a newly-FOSS contender that is, if anything, even better than GEM ever was, and looks much nicer. Its browser is no use any more, but its word processor and spreadsheet look pretty OK to me. And while I find it crashes a lot I have not yet explored how to configure it for non-real-MS-DOS. There *are* options in there. ISTM, and just IMHO, that it would be a worthy addition. Just IMHO I think not having a replacement for DOSshell is a significant omission. That's all. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
