Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/28/the-wild-west-of-dos-graphical-user-interfaces-before-windows-overwhelmed-all-of-them.html
…
8 Likes
This is so interesting, I was in my preteens when 95/98 reigned supreme.
I hadn’t been aware there were ever competing windowing systems ala Linux.
Interesting aesthetic.
1 Like
A lot of these seem like post-95 systems that could be bolted on to a DOS system. It would be interesting to see what was available at the time, back when windows was much clunkier and other GUIs were a better offering.
3 Likes
What I remember is that they slowed my 8088 processor and Hercules graphics card to a crawl. I remember when I got a Pentium box Windows 3 was a dog compared to DOS.
3 Likes
I didn’t see GEM or GeoWorks. Pretty cool that DeskMate is on the list, that brings back memories of the computer lab in my school.
6 Likes
Aye, there were lots of DOS menu programs, but most of them all had the big problem that they took up RAM and wouldn’t give it up when you actually needed to run something.
5 Likes
Interesting. We got our first computer in '92 and I remember there being a few sort of GUI systems installed on there along with Windows 3(maybe 3.1). I think DOS Shell was the one I used the most, ultimately preferring to just use the command line most of the time.
4 Likes
GEOS on the C-64 was pretty good for a computer that wasn’t wasn’t designed for that sort of environment. I wrote a few ML functions on the 64 long before GEOS that gave basic drop-down menus and somewhat of a taskbar… I think it was for a BBS admin/sysop interface. 40 years ago now.
Often when working on a Raspberry Pi, I’ll use the base desktop image for fiddling around, even if all the fiddling is in a CMD window. Just feels like you can do more.
5 Likes
Yea and with 640k ram we didn’t have any to spare.
3 Likes
Deskview X FTW.
This was not what I expected. It’s all windows 3 clone vibes. DOS had amazing GUIs with a totally different aesthetic than these like the text mode ones! I like those much more.
3 Likes
The first screenshot on the list gets up your hopes too
I’m just old enough to remember the world transitioning from clerks with lightning-fast fingers zapping around textmode interfaces to clerks taking forever to click and pick laboriously through windowed ones.
9 Likes
I don’t remember which one, but back in the day, I used one of these for desktops at my company because DOS was too confusing for average users to deal with. I do remember that I had to do some futzing to patch it together with a package called BossaNova, which was a PC front end for IBM AS400. We worked with that for about 3 years until better UIs became available. Old-timers continued to call the new systems BossaNova for years afterward.
1 Like
2 Likes
That would be always.
5 Likes
Nothing beat Norton Commander for working with files.
6 Likes
I remember using QuikMenu and Norton Commander in high school. My Tandy1000 had some other menuing system that I can’t quite recall, but it wasn’t DeskM8 (or at least, whatever incarnation is on that list).
QuikMenu had this super awesome feature that allowed you to just straight up delete the locking password out of the config file (if you could get to it, which was trivial if you could get to a prompt), opening the machine for all your mid-90s high school computer lab shenanigans.
1 Like
I used XTree most of the time.
4 Likes
Love it. I have one of those Pocket 386 laptops. It’s an ultra sub notebook made from new old stock embedded 386sx CPUs. It has a lot of problems, but it’s also a lot of fun. The same company makes the netbook-sized Book 8088 which is more practical but slower and the CGA version had a terrible LCD bug.
I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re willing to scour the forums and do a little soldering to fix the known issues.
1 Like
I was a big fan of DESQview. But then again, I also love tmux. I’m just a sucker for text-based windowed apps.
