Xcom is a crossplatform GUI system: a multi-windowed, multi-tasking environment. Xcom allows you to browse, copy, view and manage your files, start and stop programs, watch and listen basic media content and music. Unlike other windowing systems and protocols, it integrates the basic functionality as a monolithic, cohesive program. Xcom can run on top of various kernel, currently the DOS version is available publicly. Xcom is tiny in size, fast, doesn’t requires installation process. Xcom is hundreds of times faster and smaller than competitive systems – it requires only about 5 MBytes of disk space, and starts up within a few seconds.
Xcom has a familiar appearance of classic operating system user interfaces. Xcom is a handy tool to keep it on your retro computer, it can work magnitudes faster than any other modern desktop environment, meanwhile the features are up-to date. Xcom has all the basic tools for browsing pictures, listening to music files, reading and writing text documents and drawing simple graphics.
This is an interesting approach to developing a full… User interface? Operating environment? It currently is only available for DOS, but other systems should follow. It does have a few intrinsic limitations – since it’s entirely contained in one program, you can’t develop for this or create new applications, since it’s not a toolkit and doesn’t have a compiler or anything like that. It’s also not open source, and while that doesn’t mean it’s not good or not interesting, it does limit the interest this will gather in the wider community.
Regardless, it looks great, and it’s clear a lot of work and love went into it.
I just tried it in DosBox and it’s funny, although I’m not sure about it being useful. As a GUI shell for DOS, it is very promising. DOS lives 😉
This is very interesting. One wonders what the end-game is.
While it is only available as a DOS program for now, it seems clear that the dev focus for the last year has been *nix. Presumably that means Linux although I am sure it will run equally well on the BSDs.
Without having tried it yet, it seems very impressive. It is too bad it is not Open Source. It would be interesting to see how the applications are created internally. Is there likely to be an API at some point to create other applications? Or is this intended to forever be only a set of applications providing basic functionality?
Again, I am very curious what the vision for this project is.
Anyone else having pleasant flashbacks to SEAL?
https://www.osnews.com/story/939/seal-dos-gui-version-20011-released/
The looks are entirely different of course, but the idea that people are revisiting a GUI shell for DOS as a lightweight system is nice. I was always disappointed that not many people tried to make a go of it with SEAL when it was released. Oh there was some attention back then but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. Hopefully this will go further than they did. Thanks for sharing this, Thom!
Behold, the last post on the SEAL forums…
Seal isn’t not dead… It’s just sleeping
Post by losinggeneration » Fri Feb 11, 2005 10:39 pm
Isn’t it open source…. Meaning that someone could pick up the project at any time? Thus, I think saying current development is stopped is better than calling the project dead. If it were closed source, then you would be able to rightfully call the project dead.
https://sealsystem.sourceforge.io/download.php
That is highly ironic and comedic in the context of the dead parrot reference
Might be a little early for them to call it cross-platform …
But I do love it.
If you can call your company Netflix years before moving away from the physical mail, I can permit them some forward thinking in their naming scheme.
That said, if you read the “blog”, it says that they have been working on the “*nix” version most of this year. In fact, some of the features in the most recent dev release “do not work on DOS”. So, it is cross-platform already for somebody. I am not sure what “*nix” is but either Linux or BSD or both I would assume.