Hi, On Fri, Jul 28, 2023 at 11:51 AM Liam Proven via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > For me, when I worked with, supplied and supported DOS in the late > 1980s and early 1990s, the chronology went like this: > > [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.
I never used DOSShell much. I always used other file managers (in limited ways because it hides the cmdline, which is much easier to use for utilities and programming), e.g. Tutordo, Dos Controller, Necromancer's DOS Navigator, Doszip. Some people frown upon the "hard to use" cmdline, but it's scriptable and you can automate so much. The "interface" can be arcane, but I don't see the speed advantage to "add graphical widgets and mouse support". I find the mouse "mostly" redundant for most tasks. I personally find GUI overrated, TUI underrated, and cmdline (usually) easy enough to use. > [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. VCPI was a superset of EMS, right? That was co-designed by QuarterDeck (DesqView company), right? It was meant to make multitasking more stable, but DPMI (later invented for Windows 3.0 but also implemented elsewhere) was much better designed and more popular. Before Win95, all you had was 32-bit DOS extenders. By the time Vista (and its DPMI "limit") came out, nobody cared anymore. The other complication was the different versions (e.g. XMSv2 versus the bigger 386 variant v3) and whether your EMM386 could share XMS and EMS at the same time. There were various complications there. Since the XMS standard and support was so "late", several compilers (e.g. Turbo C) only enabled "use EMS" by default. In fact, quite a few apps and games were "EMS only", even 386+ programs. (It was only DJGPP v2 in 1996 where they went "DPMI only".) > [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. DR-DOS 5 was their equivalent to MS-DOS 3.3. (Version numbers were a marketing ploy.) > [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*. I believe "task swapping" was one of the main benefits of a 286. For instance, DR-DOS 7.03 supports "task swapping" on 286s but only "multitasks" on 386s. (This probably also goes back to IBM's own TopView, which predated DesqView.) The DesqView/X SDK used DJGPP v1, but I don't know much about that (or DesqView in general). > 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. Clearly OS/2 and/or Windows were considered the future. (Novell's attempt at improving DR-DOS failed against Win95.) > [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. Win95 was better. (I still have my overformatted "upgrade" Win95 floppies.) > 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. NT was not aimed at DOS software. It was incomplete in DOS support in many ways (and had a much higher footprint). NT also wasn't (at that time) intended for gaming. OS/2 2.x (and up) was the 32-bit OS after IBM and MS parted ways. So IBM was handling it all themselves. > > 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. Apparently "Visi On" in 1983 was the first (and yes, it did allow third-party apps in "restricted subset of C" for its VM.) * http://toastytech.com/guis/vision.html > Just IMHO I think not having a replacement for DOSshell is a > significant omission. That's all. Oh, don't forget Georg's work on the XFDOS desktop: * https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
