In the 1980s, Radio Shack parent Tandy Corp. released a graphical user interface called DeskMate that shipped with its TRS-80 and Tandy personal computers. It made its PCs easier to use and competed with Windows. Let’s take a look back.
I’ve never used DeskMate – or Tandy computers in general – but there was a whole (cottage) industry of DOS graphical user interfaces and alternative Windows shells during the 3.x days, most notably Norton Desktop. If you ever have an empty weekend you want to fill up- fire up a DOS or windows 3.x virtual machine, and go to town. You can easily lose days researching this particular technological dead end.
Those all died when Windows 95 had native multi-tasking for DOS (Virtual 86 + DPMI). Yes, there were other alternatives, and even Windows 3.1 had rudimentary support for multiple DOS programs.
But they mostly had to share the same OS instance with many hacky hooks, and unreliable TSRs, and one DOS program failing could have caused the entire machine to lock down.
My memory could be failing me, but 1995 was the time we started losing interest in alternative DOS versions (Novell DOS anyone?), DOS shells (DESQView?), Windows alternatives (GEM?), and of course entire operating systems (OS/2). Even Novell Netware went into sidelines when Windows came with basic peer-to-peer file sharing.
Moral of the story: being #2 in software world is a very risky position.
Different people can have different experiences, but in my universe, during 1992-1994 enough Windows programs were being produced for it to be the de-facto operating environment, which eliminated all the other environments. Prior to that point there weren’t many applications available for any of them, so as you suggest, all that matters is whether they can host DOS programs better than DOS (which is surprisingly hard.) After 1994, It was still possible to use a different DOS, although there wasn’t much reason to aside from price when Windows is the operating environment.
Even at the time, Windows 95 raised antitrust concerns because it bundled Windows and DOS, and seemed like an attempt to prevent people using alternate versions of DOS. Looking back, alternate DOS systems were a great business because the product itself is relatively simple but the target market was huge. Consumers may have had no good reason to choose one over another, but producers had good reasons to have products available at lower prices than MS-DOS, which Windows 95 effectively precluded.
Hey, I tried the FOSS version FreeGEM once since it came bundeled with FreeDOS. I’m no big DOS user though so I haven’t tried it since.
If you want to go real hardcore though you should check out GEOS ☺
DPMI is actually older than that (Windows 3.0 era), and Windows was preemptively multitasking DOS programs since Windows 2.1x (aka Windows/386).
Basically, On a 386 or newer processor, Windows 2.1 had a fully 32-bit hypervisor with a 16-bit Windows in one virtual machine (with all Windows apps existing in the same memory space) and any number of DOS VMM86 virtual machines, each of them preemptively multitasked.
But yeah, since Windows 95 came out nobody cared about DOS enough to be interested in new DOS features that might’ve been added by non-Microsoft DOS makers.
Hmm… I remember seeing DOS4GW everywhere, but did not realize it was standardized that early.
And that reminds another thing for Windows 95/DOS: the games
If I recall correctly, DirectX came much later, and there was some basic gaming API with little adoption. So, most games, still ran in DOS mode, and Windows 95 was able to work with them fine. They actually spent a lot of time making sure old games were compatible with the system.
I learned to type using DeskMate. I was the only one in the class that got to learn on a computer. Everyone else had to use typewriters. I was certainly thankful for the backspace key! This would have been in the late ’90s. Probably ’96 of ’97, I think. Yes, even then it was an old outdated computer, but it was sure better than the typewriters everyone else had! I already knew DOS and Windows 3.1, but I did enjoy exploring DeskMate for the year that I got to.
Deskmate was the only GUI I know of with a 40 column mode. The development guide makes for interesting reading. One drawback for Deskmate was that the display resolution was limited to 640 by 480 with 16 colors.
It was 1992 that sales of Windows spreadsheets and word processors finally exceeded their DOS counterparts. A number of factors caused this including the long gap between versions of DOS Wordperfect and the buggy nature of Lotus 1-2-3 R3 and the desire for features like WYSIWYG editing.
Ahhh , Personal Deskmate was my goto on my Tandy 1000 EX and TX when I was young. Also worked with Homeword as a DOS Wordprocessor.