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posted by martyb on Friday March 15 2019, @09:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Why-not-call-it-the-Open-Sea-Shell? dept.

GEOS is getting a fifth shot at life, as the 1990s DOS shell—despite the name, it is not an OS, in the strictest sense of the term—has been released as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license by new owner blueway.Softworks.

Releasing PC/GEOS as open source came with significant hurdles, considering how often the platform changed hands. “After Frank S. Fischer, the former owner and long time GEOS enthusiast passed away, I worked with Breadbox's former CTO John Howard and Frank’s wife, as the new owner, to acquire the rights to give PC/GEOS a future and a new home,” Falk Rehwagen, former Breadbox employee and owner of new rights holder blueway.Softworks, told TechRepublic. “There always was the vision to make the technology available to the community to enable further developments, make it a living and developable system.”

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-pcgeos-found-a-5th-life-as-an-open-source-dos-shell/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:47AM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:47AM (#815299) Journal

    Well, I guess you could put it the way you did in your subject line, but that's how everything was back then. DOS was your operating system. Anything with a GUI ran on top of DOS, including all versions of Windows before 95. (Well, Windows 95 was a bit of a hackjob in that respect, but nevermind that for now.)

    Point is: yes there were alternative GUIs for those who were inclined toward the mouse in the early days, including GEOS, which was a heck of a lot better than the earliest versions of Windows.

    But I do find it a bit amusing to call something a "sorta GUI for DOS," as if DOS needed a GUI to be useful, or alternatively that someone went out of their way to make a GUI for DOS. It was just a GUI, which wasn't yet standard in those days. Most people just were used to working with command-line tools and applications that required keyboard-based commands, menus, and navigation in their interfaces.

    The mouse and GUI was often a step backwards in efficiency, though it increased transparency and usability for newer users.

    (It always feels ironic that the next evolution in that regard -- touch screens -- has widely resulted in LACK of transparency. Instead of memorizing an arcane list of keyboard shortcuts as people had to do in the pre-mouse era to avoid lots of scrolling through menus and help, nowadays one has to memorize loads of arcane "pull down from top, then two-finger swipe, followed by double-tap on ambiguous pictogram" with often no clear help or instructions to find said gesture combinations or figure out what the pictograms mean. In an era where getting info about and through the interface should be easiest, it often feels completely opaque.)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @09:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @09:49AM (#815374)

    Yeah, I know. I used MS-DOS 3 and newer.

    Also find it ridiculous how many GNU/Linux users are scared shitless of the terminal. Probably people who've been pushing mouse all their lives and know nothing else. Some things are easier poking around with a mouse and some things easier on the CLI.

    And touch devices are a horror show, don't own one and not planning to get one either.