#dr-dos

There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Sixty Six

Gary Kildall (1942 – 1994) The early days of computing were a bit like the Wild West where fortunes were won and lost and where the unwary were ripped off. What has been particularly liberating for the ordinary users of PCs has been the development of operating language and protocols which are intuitive and easy to use. You would think that the brainbox who made all this possible would have been…

Here are some Windowing Systems that should run on FreeDOS and a few others that might possibly be able to as well...

OpenGEM -- it works... but is not the best experience. Part of default FreeDOS distro; simple and stable; very low resource requirements.

oZone GUI on Sourceforge (Screenshots)

SEAL GUI on Sourceforge (Screenshots)

QubeOS DOS GUI on Sourceforge -- “An open-source shell for FreeDOS written in QBasic”; a tad buggy. (a screenshot)

The proprietary DESQview; which also has a variant useable with ancient versions of XWindows. (X Screenshots)

GEOS / “Breadbox Ensemble” ** -- proprietary, commercial; $70 license fee.  (Open Source, see below) Basically an entire OS/Distro. Can run native in Windows 95 -- XP; DOSBox officially supported (required for Vista, 7, 10 etc). Has Windows SDK to create native GEOS applications. Possibly best option on this list.

[ ** Sad news: Frank S. Fischer, owner of Breadbox Computing, passed away in November of 2015 at the age of 69. :--( The breadbox.com domain expired in mid-2016 and is unavailable. Appears no way to legitimately obtain new copies; maybe will have to pirate... ] (see below)

GEOS is now available on github!: https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

FLTK for DOS -- Fast Light Toolkit for DOS. “...port of the FLTK GUI to DOS and Apps using it.”

Access -- proprietary; simple DOS menu program. Sports VGA icons. (screenshots) Author also develops DBGL, a graphical front-end for DOSBox written in Java.

Arachne -- extensible graphical Web browser with file manager and system addons; is basically Firefox of DOS browsers. (can demo the emulated version on Internet Archive in your browser)

DOS Shell -- proprietary; came with MS / PC-DOS. Simple graphical file manager shell but sort of gets the job done. Looks like Windows 3.1.

Desktop2 -- Open source file- and program-manager. Features drag and drop multi-pane file management, a CD player, built-in text-editor, screen-savers, etc. Available in German and English versions.

DOS Start! -- proprietary; file manager and graphical environment for launching programs. Uses a Windows 9x-styled interface and “start button” paradigm. Screenshots at bottom of linked page (served via Wayback Machine); here is an animated GIF of it in action.

Norton Desktop for DOS -- proprietary; file manager shell with some Norton utilities. Kludgy. (Screenshots)

DeskMate -- proprietary; developed by Tandy Corporation. A little kludgy. An “environment” & not generic shell. Software needs to be ported to take full advantage. (Screenshots) (downloads)

FastGL / OpenGUI (???) -- not sure on this one; page on Internet Archive says: “...32-bit graphics library and GUI for MS-DOS ...” Might work, might not. Probably will have to hack 'em out by scratch.

N2K-OS -- FreeDOS distro and GUI.

QuikMenu -- proprietary; sort of a customizable launcher / workbench thing. Version 1.07c appears to be available on Internet Archive but version III (3) is recommended. Company is defunct so will have to pirate.

GVFM -- proprietary graphical file-manager. It’s an example program included with the proprietary Graphic Vision. Graphic Vision is described by its authors as: a “... DPMI based object-orientated application framework and utilities suite for the professional Borland Pascal programmer...”

ToastyTech's "Win Shells" category has various proprietary GUIs as well. Many are from the early Windows 3.1 - 95 days. There may be success in getting them to run under FreeDOS. Some require Win 3.1 to be installed however (i.e. Calmira). Poke around; ToastyTech is great. :)

Shouldn't be too difficult to get your hands on software from ToastyTech group as warez/abandonware.

A few more examples available from:

http://www.bttr-software.de/freesoft/desktops.htm

http://reimagery.com/fsfd/desktops.htm

Which include a couple of file managers but, my list here is more complete.

Interesting DOS programs list have a lot of cool stuff and is reasonably up to date (August 2017 when last checked).

dr-dos replied to your post: liziswhat: IN YOUR FACE ANARCHY Democ...

Let me know when Democracy catches a legendary bird~

O Microsoft Windows começou a ser desenvolvido em setembro de 1981 e passou a ser considerado um Sistema Operativo (SO) após o lançamento do Windows NT, em Agosto de 1993.

O Windows surgiu inicialmente como uma interface gráfica para MS-DOS, que permitiu correr programas e modo gráfico, o que permitiu a utilização do rato, que até à altura era considerado desnecessário em computadores do tipo IBM-PC.