An Actively Developed GUI for ... FreeDOS?

shanecoughlan writes "FreeDOS, the GPL DOS distribution, has a powerful little graphical user interface called OpenGEM being actively developed for it. Well, powerful is relative. OpenGEM is based off the DR GEM GUI from the 1980s, and is a 16bit single-tasking GUI that tends not to use extended memory. While KDE and GNOME might not be shaking in their boots, it's an interesting opensource project in its own right. And it runs on a 286 with 640kb of RAM..."

Comments

Remember kids...

[alanoneil]

"640k ought to be enough for anybody"

Seriously though, It's good to see some developers going back to the roots of coding tight, efficient programs given certain constraints, instead of making huge bloated apps and recommending PCs built around the app.

Re:Remember kids...

[RAMMS EIN]

On the other hand, the arbitrary constraints that plagued various aspects of the PC architecture are just plain wrong. With a 16-bit segment register and a 16-bit offset register, you'd expect the thing to be able to address more than 20 bits worth of memory.

Hard drives also hit various limits at various times...BIOS limits, limitations of the CHS addressing scheme, and we might soon be hitting a limit the LBA addressing scheme as well (although that at least makes sense).

Of course, all these limits exist because nobody expected such an explosive growth of the amount of internal and external memory that can be cheaply bought, but you'd think they'd eventually realize that arbitrary limits should be avoided instead of replaced by new ones. Other architectures (even some older ones) have had much fewer problems with arbitrary limits than the PC had...if they can get it right, why can't the PC designers?

And I haven't even talked about the software yet. The fact that people were still running DOS, with all its limitations from the 8088 era, long into the Pentium era, is just the stupidest thing ever.

Screenshots!

[paulius_g]

0.25 seconds of Googling:

http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/bsg fx/os/opengem-scr-01.png
http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/bsg fx/os/opengem-scr-02.png
http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/bsg fx/os/opengem-scr-03.png
http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/bsg fx/os/opengem-scr-04.png
http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/bsg fx/os/opengem-scr-05.png

Enjoy! :-)

This is an interesting project.

[jd]

GEM was a nice GUI - I used it quite a bit. It wasn't that powerful, but it did what it was designed to do. An Open Source version of DesqView would make an excellent companion project to this, as that was the other popular environment of the day.

There were only a few other packages that were really of exceptional worth - so exceptional, they were "must-haves" for anyone from home users to corporate users. Although, in many ways, nobody would really "use" these programs today, they would have massive educational value as they would provide an excellent way for people to study key components of modern systems without having to dive into all the modern complexity.

The packages I would consider "exceptional" would be QEMM (I can't see anyone disagreeing there) and Norton Guides (good intro to interrupt stacking and context sensitivity). Possibly the EARLY Norton Utilities as well.

Needs web browser

[ArmorFiend]

So who has the cahones to develop a standards-compliant web browser for this gui? Meet the new killer app. Same as the old killer app.

I've been poking around for a viable web-surfing configuration for an 8mb pentium-1 system, and there really is nothing out there.

Meh.

[stonecypher]

Contiki does more in about 30k of ram.