This looks very similar to Turbo Vision. A framework used by many programs back then. It allowed creatng complex Windows-like text based user interfaces.
Borland's Turbo Vision was widely used by DOS programs in the '90s, and I actually prefer its more efficient use of screen real estate and better use of contrasting colors. But Visual BASIC for DOS is interesting in how hard they tried to make it look like a text-mode version of Windows.
@@vwestlifeI was wondering if you know what this was we had a program for ms dos and instead of typing it made like a smart menu and you could start programs by linking them to a number. I think it was called smart menu I may have my diskette some were.
From what I can see, Visual Basic for DOS came out in 1992, two years after Turbo Vision. Microsoft probably got the idea from seeing Borland's product.
I love the fact that there was really a lot of thought and attention to detail put into this, even going as far to use darker blocks to replicate window shadows.
That was mandatory back then. You did not draw a pop-up window without a drop shadow. It just wasn't done. Now, the controversy was whether you should use two blocks for the right-hand shadow, or just one, since the text-mode characters were twice as tall as they were wide. If you didn't have to worry about what was underneath (e.g., coloring the existing content underneath, vs. drawing your shadow on a solid background), then you could use the half-block box-drawing characters. Similar considerations were necessary for the proper way to handle progress meters. There were ASCII characters with 25, 50, and 75% dithered fill, but some heathens decided just to fill the progress meter with a solid block the same color as the window background, like the progress bar was erasing all trace of its existence over time! Outrageous!
I programmed something similar to this in QuickBasic as a kid so my technologically challenged parents could use their computer. It basically responded to what you did on the screen by writing to a batch file, exiting, running external programs and then returning back to the vaguely guiesque ANSI command centre
This operating system is actually quite easy to find, but not on Google. I don't know why people still use Google. It's one of the worst search engines now. This site is owned by google, SO, if I tell you where you CAN find this OS (in multiple places), Google will delete this post. There's more than one search engine. I can maybe give you a hint - COMRADE.
@@TheCentaury You're wrong in two ways. First, the Internet is infinite in size and storage at this point. Second, operating systems aren't complicated because they have to genuinely be complicated, it's because they are poorly written. This little OS demonstrates that.
@@TheCentaury This video presentation on the operating system takes up more space than the actual os does. It doesn't matter. We didn't make the Internet for you. We made is despite you.
Love that Dave's Garage explained it was too hard for Win95 to have seconds displayed on the tray clock, and here's this little guy that did it in '92 under DOS.
Nope, it wasn't hard at all. They just didn't want to have the then-systems slowing down by updating the graphical text for the clock every second, thats what Dave explained in detail ;). This here runs in text mode, and isn't required to run other programs simultaneously (DOS16, Win16 and Win32)... so the comparison doesn't fit at all anyway ;)...
@@Lofote I watched his whole vid on that. Seems odd they couldn't work it out, but I guess there wasn't a big need for it. If you wanted a clock with seconds, there were plenty of apps that could add this function to the tray, or have a little window on-screen, anyway.
Not a fair comparison at all. :-) Windows would've had to load the glyphs, measure each character's width (since they were variable-width), center it, etc. Text-mode just threw the ASCII character codes into video RAM and called it a day. Exponentially less work.
That's really interesting. The UI screams that it's written in Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS. Edit: Thinking about it more, this is probably just a VB DOS program that has those built in functions (notepad, check register, etc.). It doesn't seem like there's a way to add a program for it. It just had a DOS shell for that. Given this came out in 1996, it's kind of a poor attempt at something like Deskmate, just with far fewer useful functions.
Most of the "included" apps are just VBDOS demo apps (Check Manager, Calculator, Notepad, Chart, etc). EDIT: All are demo VBDOS apps come to think of it. He's just dumped them into one program.
@@manuell3505 For small projects it was great, fast and easy to develop. There was of course memory limitations but one could easily use libraries and extended memory for this. Also, if I remember correctly there was a database engine calles ISAM that simplified database apps development.
Came here to say that. Used QBASIC quite a bit, but was very happy to switch to VB DOS when it came out. The clue is the file VBDRT10.EXE. That's the VB DOS runtime.
The king of DOS shells was DOS Navigator for me, ever since I learned about its existence. It launched into a Norton Commander clone by default, but it contained LOTS of features, including a text editor, a spreadsheet (!), a Tetris clone, a calculator, a phone book, a CD player, a serial terminal emulator, on top of everything you'd expect from an orthodox file manager. Only the archive file support was a little lackluster, as it relied entirely on calling into external programs. But best of all, it was written using Turbo Vision, so all those features could run concurrently, in overlapping windows much like these. It was larger of course, spanning about a megabyte installed with all those features, but it made a much more full-featured and usable environment.
DOS Navigator was very interesting, but I preferred something minimalistic with only the features that are absolutely needed. Have you ever heard of an Ukrainian Norton Commander clone called Volkov Commander? It was a complete clone of NC 3.0 with some features of NC 4.0 and some extra features not present in either (like TSR programs memory map). It was writen completely in assembly language and took below 60K on disk (the executable file only, without the online help file) and the resident portion took only about 5K of RAM, if I remember correctly, so you could run programs with quite big memory requirements without having to exit it (as it was sometimes needed with the actual NC). Great thing, was very popular among my colleagues back then...
@@0raj0 Back in the 90s, the time of rampant piracy, I stumbled upon a version of "Norton Commander" that used suspiciously little disk space, and generally felt a little bit odd, although was fully functional for the most part. After some digging I learned that it was actually Volkov Commander that somebody hacked by replacing the string "Volkov" with "Norton". I later learned that Volkov Commander itself was nothing shady but a perfectly legitimate product. But I never actually used it properly. I actually started my journey with NC5, and then migrated to DN - as a DOS shell whenever I needed one because that was already the time of using Win9x as the daily driver. I never really had much need for something as lightweight as VC. I still occasionally use Midnight Commander on Linux and macOS for various tasks.
PopDos is the one. What fun and trouble this very small Dos-disk! Still have a copy just for fun in storage. Haven't used it in some time, it like traveling back in time to the Day's when the world was innocent for people just willing to learn new things. Thanks for your text Bro.🙏🏾🇹🇹.
According to a brief search, he's assistant night shift co-manager of the Dairy Queen in the town of Lick Skillet, Alabama and he's 26. Or, he's a retired RAF Air Marshal and just turned 106 years young in his beautiful home in Bakewell, Derbyshire, England. My search my have been too brief. 😁
Very interesting, it’s actually quite complex considering how little space it takes up. Nice to see this is now preserved and won’t be lost to time, great video!
But it isn't a operating system, it is a shell with some internal applications ;)... And there were other programs that could do most of it on similar machines, like Microsoft Works for DOS, etc.
True, it is a shell... But if it contains the preemptive multitasker it could be considered a rudimentary OS. But considering that it is running on a x286 suggests that it is real mode so it will be a shell and rely on the DOS OS for everything.
Windows 3 + OS/2 = OS/5? It looks like a cute project but pretty limited in features. I wonder if the full version came with source so you could add stuff.
Oh man, you have no idea... :-) Under the right circumstances, this would've slayed. Expectations weren't very high back then. It's miles ahead of the DOS Shell in terms of features (although, DOS Shell had a fancy multitasker that would've been tricky to implement.) It's similar to Tandy's DeskMate, which no doubt moved its fair share of Tandy 1000s in store demos. And it's nearly as useful as Windows 2.0. About the only thing it's missing -- and frankly, this is kind of a big thing -- is support for loadable applications. I'm guessing this is all monolithic, and the apps that are built-in are the entirety of the OS/5 ecosystem. But, if Mr. Poole had come up with a loader to pull chunks of code from other files into memory, and execute them as a first-class application with full windowing API support and all that... whew. There was a period of time where Windows was considered too big and heavy for a lot of users. It was an aspirational OS. ("OS" -- really just more of a shell at that time, since it required DOS to run. An "operating _environment, "_ if you will.) Quite a bit of work was being done in single-tasking DOS applications, because graphics cards and high-resolution (sic) monitors were expensive, and the memory and CPU requirements were significant for the time. A text-mode windowing system like this would've been a very decent compromise, that allowed multi-tasking, clipboard support, file management, and background printing -- often all things that users would graft on, piecemeal, via TSRs, in some kind of Frankenstein's Monster fashion. The crucial factor, as always, would be whether anyone wrote applications for it. If this had been developed commercially, with continuous development, support, and (most importantly) a sense that it would still exist in a few years -- and thus making it a worthwhile target for 3rd parties -- well, it still may have been hardly more than a footnote. Titans fell on this point alone, more often than not.
@@nickwallette6201 This shell would have been viable in the late 1980s and very early 1990s. By 1996 when this was released used 486 machines that ran Windows 3.1 perfectly fine were quite affordable, even new ones weren't that expensive. Pentiums were but that changed quickly as well. A year later my school bought a load of 25 IBM PS/VP 486 DX/2 66 boasting 8 MB of RAM and 250 MB hard drives for a song and they felt pretty outdated by the time. Few people in industrialised countries were still forced to use DOS on XTs and 286s in 1996.
@@nickwallette6201 this was probably waaaay too little and too late for the party. The FM is *extremely* basic even compared to DOS Shell and you can't even add shortcuts for your everyday DOS sotfware, having to use the prompt to do any serious work anyway. Also... 1996. Even my school's outdated computers could run Windows 3.x comfortably, with MS Office and other useful applications. And adding loadable software support was probably a much more complex task than the entire application that was delivered. By the way, you might be interested in DESQView. The first version came out in 1984, was a text-mode interface with resizeable windows and could run regular DOS applications with multitasking (even in real mode, though later versios could leverage protected mode and extended memory when coupled with QEMM/386)
Thank you for sharing this with us! It's really cool to have this interesting piece of history archived, and it makes me wonder if there's any other tech history that's still yet to be uncovered.
It didn't take off because it wasn't very useful, I guess. It was also pretty late to the party, even though the video claims that "John Poole was way ahead of his time". If you want to see how something like this was done properly and a decade earlier, take a look at Framework III by Ashton-Tate. It's a CUI-based DOS office package.
Take off? This DOS shell is just a novelty, albeit a cool one. It's something like a competitor to Windows 1.0 done over a decade later (in an era when computing evolved at twice or more the pace it does today). It's nice, but not universally useful for the time period.
People forget that at this time there were still a lot of people actively using PCs that were too old to run Windows 95, and maybe even were a bit on the slow side for Windows 3.1. There was a pretty nice little niche market for DOS shells that covered this sort of use case. I wouldn't call this an OS by any stretch but it looks like it would have made a great DOS shell on these lower end PCs.
If he had made any real money from it, or it had become a real rival, I am betting they would have sued. But it probably wasn't worth suing someone over this. Probably got a cease and desist letter from them.
When you can't even find any info on the internet about this program, you can tell this little project did not exactly make waves. Its existence was most probably an anecdote, so it likely went under the radar.
I created many utilities in VB for DOS, back in 1992-94. Also used a textual UI library for C called TUICP. I might even still have my floppy disks with that stuff... But no floppy drive.
Very true.Just this week I opened a box of old floppies because I wanted to use them on my vintage RiscStation R7500 and of the 10 I tested only one worked even though they were sealed and stored well.
@@electroman1996 True, I recently dug out some disks I made back in the 1990s, and back then I made further backup sets of the source files but only one set out of a few sets still worked, so I made sure to extract the remaining working set onto my PC to make some new backups. Some of my original floppies were made using a proprietry disk compression format on an Atari STE, making the disks specific to that machine's drive only and not even another Atari STE would be able to read it. This was back when I was trying to get as much storage out of a 720KB DS/DD as possible, and did not have the luxury of a hard disk, CD writer etc.
@@EgoShredder oh yeah, I remember trying to squeeze as much data as possible onto floppies on my Atari STFM, often formatting them with 86 tracks of 11 sectors each. That was already pushing it a bit too far, but if you tried any more tracks the head would make an unhealthy sounding click...
I am very glad you preserved this. About 30 years ago there where a lot of these sorts of programs that used what Code Page 437 had to offer. Yes, you could make a "semi-graphical" UI out of CP-437 ! One I used back then after trying out a bunch I downloaded from a BBS was the (IIRC) "Nickl Menu System" that looked amazing on MDA. So many of these have been lost.
MDA ftw. Actually, I can top that: the AT&T/Olivetti 640x400 monochrome "CGA compatible" For software that supported it, the resolution was fantastic. Windows/286 supported it; unfortunately I never found an Autocad DOS driver, so that plodded along at CGA res.
Actually works shockingly well. I could see this being useful for owners of older PCs that couldn't run windows effectively or wanted something a little simpler
"OS/5 Alive" has got to be a Batteries Not Included reference. OS/5 was really well done, Poole took his time to get this right. It was great to see this run in 43-line EGA and 50-line VGA mode, that really opened it up. I would love to see this run on a PC or XT, off a 5.25" floppy, with real CGA and snow. I just might have to give that a shot.
On my Tandy 1000SX, which is about 30% faster than the original IBM PC, it's a bit sluggish but acceptable. I haven't tried OS/5 on a real IBM CGA card in a long time, but I don't think it suffers from "snow".
For clarification, this is not an operating system but rather an operating environment and there were many such environments including GeoWorks, GEM, and TopView to name just a few. Very cool though!
I was just thinking about that and commented somewhere else. Technically it/they are shells rather than an OS, but if they are running in protected mode they can exhibit OS abilities. Windows 1.0 to 3.1 functioned similar to this.
From my personal experience schools were more into Pascal at the time and were far less ambitious. This feels far more like someone teaching them self Visual Basic for Dos and they managed to create a Dos desktop.
@@manolokonosko2868 They're relying a lot on what their development environment provided, just using it pretty effectively, so a reasonable accomplishment, but certainly not worth $20, especially when that $20 would've been more like $50. :p Definitely could've been something a well-determined student could've done in high school, or certainly university level student.
For what seems to be a one-person project, it's actually quite impressive. :) It's no surprise that it didn't catch on, though. In 96, a much more sophisticated Windows 95 was already established for about a year. Hardly anyone would pick anything else for home and office, at that point.
Yeah, I'm fairly sure (although it's been a long time since I used it), that the "Control Panel" and "Chart" features are based on samples that came with VB for DOS.
At 7:56 it shows vbdrt10.exe, a companion file for visual basic dos applications and in the readme it lists it as a required file for installation Edit: i guess we should all watch the entire video before commenting lol
@@mallardtheduck1 It's VB 1.0 for sure. When reviewing the readme at 06:56, you can see the Visual Basic Runtime 1.0 exe in the folder. VWestLife even talks about it starting 13:25
@@olivierpericat9224 Ditto. I will never forget its look and feel. At the peak of my QuickBASIC days I eventually discovered Visual Basic for MS-DOS 1.0 and thus got into properly programming TUIs under DOS (after being used to writing these routines myself and without any mouse support).
Wow. Not only is this the only mention on the web for OS/5, it is the only mention of John Poole Software. There are of course several John Pooles (it is a common name) who work with various aspects of software, but every one I checked was far too young to be the John Poole we are looking for.
My friend and I did the same. He wrote replacement shell for MS-DOS (even had file search) and I wrote those visual apps like an editor and other things. It was somewhere 2000-01. Good old times...
I had a boxed copy of VB for dos! Made my own simple DOS shell with it when I was a kid too haha, I recognized the text mode UI style as soon as it game up on screen! Really cool to see that someone went ahead and built something far more comprehensive. VB DOS also could compile QuickBasic/QBasic programs too, which was also a big plus for a lot of people.
While it looks like something I would've scoffed at back in 1996, nowadays I can totally understand someone with a weaker machine wanting to use this. I now appreciate when a developer creates something anyone can run on anything. This is so helpful for vintage PC's now.
This reminds me of when my friends and I discovered QuickBASIC in the late 90's and used it on old PS/2 Model 30 units to make our own windowing "OS" just like this.
Lots of people were into making their own windowing GUI and desktop environments back then. I was the developer of a multitasking DOS desktop environment called X-GUI that ran its own scripted code programmed in QBasic back around 1999-2000s for example and had a lot of fun programming that software utilizing the Zephyr SVGAQB graphics library to support full color high resolution screen modes for old computers. PDS 7.1 and VBDOS both backward compatible with QuickBASIC was heavily used at that time and I programmed my installers in that along with much of my source code even though most of the time I didn't use the VB additions of it simply because I felt its compiler were more robust if I recall compared to some restraints 4.5 had.
> DOS Based > DOS Shell Hey everyone! Look! It''s an entirely separate operating system! Someone might have preferred this particular implementation, but this does not look like an especially unique piece of software. Back then, there were dozens of DOS launchers and menu programs, many of which supported various implementations of multitasking. This one is obviously drawing inspiration from Windows 3.1, which was also not an operating system, though was a much closer approximation than what we've got here.
This was meant to be an alternative OS for older DOS machines especially when Microsoft stopped supporting MS-DOS mainstream and switched to Windows! It’s good for those IBM machines and clones. Probably there was lawsuit from IBM or Microsoft to not use their copyrighted files and trademarks, is why it was scrubbed from the internet and not publicly available because of copyright issues!
Borland Sidekick had a lot of the same functionality 10 years earlier. It ran as a TSR so could run on top of other DOS programs. From memory it allowed rudimentary cut and paste between apps (either that or I'm thinking of DESQview) using a screen grabber/keyboard stuffer.
TurboPascal feel. forgot what the windowing system was called, but feels so identical. used that to create text mode uis for sometools, but never a desktop tool.
So in 98/99 I built something like this just for myself, just because all I had was a 486 25Mhz SX and programming skills I wanted to use. It also helped that I wasn't really doing my home work and was spending manner of hours doing this stuff until 4 in the morning. I figured it was nothing special and it is probably on an old 120MB HDD somewhere in a rubbish heap. Mind you I basically coded it in one giant linear chunk of code, applications and all. So it was an absolute mess of code that you couldn't expand on easily at all. I also never really documented anything so I remember going back into it about a year later only to realize I had no idea how any of it worked. Ah to be 14-15 again...
This is like the long list cousin to windows 3.11 and early MacOS Very cool and interesting. There's a text based desktop environment for Linux too, multiple of them in fact that I could only assume are based on this idea.
Around the late 1990s, QNX (QuickuNiX)had a couple of floppies that had complete OS and either a modem or ethernet connection and autodetection of devices. Tthere was a (fairly rudimentary) web browser. I found the modem version pretty much bulletproof while the network version had a limited selection of network cards.
That looks like something I wrote in Visual Basic for dos around that same time period. And, while everything compiled inside the same executable can run together, you can't run other programs and have them run concurrently. I realize you already pointed this out. But, alas. A very clever program, and props to him for doing it.
Love how the left-hand menu so closely mirrors the one you'd see within Windows w/ Alt-Space. Hell, the one that's *still* there in modern Windows. *Edit:* Firefox wants me to know that downloading OS/5 is a security risk because it wasn't sent via TLS. The people that wrote that message weren't even alive when DOS was popular, I reckon.
I mean, it is. Many people use public Wi-Fi networks without thinking twice, that warning is well needed. If it helps, the Wayback Machine can serve as a proxy of sorts for that.
There's a game creation tool called MegaZeux that uses ASCII art for graphics, and I remember one of the "games" for it was a graphical interface in the style of Windows 95. (It was mostly a novelty thing, but still pretty impressive)
Did you ever play ZZT? Or Kroz? Both games used the ANSI character set to do graphics in text mode. The Kroz series were all pre done dungeon crawl / puzzle games. ZZT had game levels included but its big draw was its built in editor and scripting language so people could make their own levels. There were a lot of user made levels and complete multi level games. There was a way to lock user created content to keep it from being edited but it was stupid simple to remove the protection with a hex editor. IIRC the word SECRET was in the level file near the beginning and replacing that with zeroes made the file modifiable with the ZZT editor.
@@greggv8 I think the point Fuzy2K is trying to make is that MegaZeux's additional features make simulating a desktop far more viable (especially given that its current devs partially unshackled it from text mode limitations with features like unbound sprites). It would be quite a struggle to pull something like that off with ZZT-OOP. And yep, you remember well! Replacing SECRET with anything else would unlock a protected world. You can also type "?+DEBUG" while in the game, as debug mode will disable the world lock check. There were also a couple other world locks developed by third parties, such as setting the saved game flag (0x108), all of which are just as easy to defeat if you know where to look.
That looks like an April fool's program. It's just a *very* primitive GUI. Also, did you notice that restoring a minimized app will reset it (content is lost)? There were so many of such GUIs back in the day. I always rather used the DOS Shell that came with MS-DOS, which is way more powerful that what most people are aware of.
It was mostly a programming exercise to see what could be done with Visual BASIC for DOS. But it's extremely rare to find anything made using VBDOS. Apparently even Microsoft never used it for their own DOS programs.
From the title of the video I mistakenly thought this was some long lost operating system that Microsoft never released. But turns out it is a GUI shell which is still kind of interesting. As you mentioned, there were a lot of these types of GUI shells that ran on top of DOS. I recall seeing many of them in shareware catalogs. My favorite one was Neosoft Quikmenu III.
I very much appreciate you bringing lost and unknown software to light, and making them available, but I wish the realities of UA-cam didn't force you to describe these as operating systems, as they aren't (the documentation read at 1:15 clearly states they are just DOS shell/menu programs). I do appreciate the vibe you were going for though.
But the full name of the program is "Operating System/5 Desktop". And by 1996 Microsoft had already muddied the waters of what counts as an "operating system" by calling Windows 95 one even though it's still just a GUI running on top of MS-DOS.
@@vwestlife That's... a really dubious assertion. Windows 95 was a hybrid. It did rely on DOS to a degree, but a BIG part of that was because it would've been suicide to enforce a complete separation from DOS at that point. One of Win95's selling points was that you could continue to use DOS in whatever way made sense -- windowed sessions, full-screen sessions under Windows, or rebooting into a pure DOS environment. I'm sure there were equal parts "let's leverage some of the work we've already done to get this product out the door" and "if we clean the slate, we'll break compatibility." But I think that was deliberate. The pendulum has swung, from the initial "OMG it's a totally new ground-up 32-bit revolution in desktop computing" to "you're not fooling me, it's just Windows 3.x with new a new skin" and I think that pessimism should have run its course by now. The MS devs have blogged about this plenty, and explained how Win95 CAN offload a lot of I/O and things to -DOS- (edit: actually, let's just say "to real-mode") ..... _if it needs to,_ to support drivers loaded in config sys, or other 16-bit code. But it's really not _that_ far from being entirely independent either. Now, calling Windows 3.1 an operating system.... *that* would be muddy water indeed. Even though, in all fairness, it really did lobotomize DOS quite a bit as well, with optional 32-bit I/O, its own memory management, etc.
Thank you so much for this video and this amazing find. I'm learning x86 assembly for fun and I'm using turbo debugger etc all the time. Now I can run everything inside OS/5, so much more fun and easy. Awesome interface, I'm in love with it. Super excited and grateful.
sad we didn't to use OS more. I remember reading studies where a machine used daily would average an uptime over 2 months before needing a reboot to clean out the temp files and cache.
That is so cool! I never even knew there was a DOS-based operating system, complete with a text-based interface. I am surprised that they did not release this much earlier. Had OS/5 been released in the late 1980s-early 1990s, this probably would have been a best seller despite of having very little graphical features. I bet OS/5 might even run under Windows 95, 98 and even Me. This rare program deserves to be archived on the Internet Archive. I am also surprised that Microsoft did not sue OS/5 for making up their own version of the "Windows" logo since it looks similar.
Cool, never heard of this one. DesQview had many similar features, and could also multitask its own apps, and even many regular dos apps and in some cases, you could cut and paste between different apps. It's probably better known than OS/5 but doesn't get the kind of retro-love it deserves, you should do a video on it. I'm always impressed at just how good a text based UI can be, the old Borland products had the same kind of deal/could be used to make Windows-like interfaces.
'Operating System' seems a bit of a stretch, but the multi-tasking is impressive. I kind of like that someone went to this much effort to bring such a functional piece of software to users of old computers while IBM and MS were pushing the boundaries (and the bloat). I guess we'll never know what happend to OS/3 and OS/4.
It’s hilarious to see someone call features that are taken for granted now bloat. Really goes to show how that word has zero meaning, it’s just “things I don’t like and can’t explain why”!
@@JollyGiant19 I wasn't talking about features, I was talking about inefficient coding. With the product cycle Microsoft had, using the same codebase to develop the next OS, it was impossible for them not to include obsolete code.
There were many good DOS-only shareware programs in the 1990s that had features that some windoze programs wouldn't have for a decade or more. My college used Buttonware (PC Type, PC Calc, PC File) because the registered shareware cost less than Microshart DOeSn't Works. PC Type had the ability to block copy and paste text (copying text much like copying spreadsheet cells) instead of editing line by line in most DOS or windoze text editors.
A quick search produced three different John Pooles in the software industry, but likely none of them are the same person (one in Canada, one in the UK, one in Australia).
This reminded me that I had downloaded a DOS shell called "Black OS NG" (or something like that) maybe in 2005 and wrote it to a CD. If I remember correctly the software was free and it has been developed in 2004. Its look was somewhat similar to the default LXDE theme with a black taskbar but it was a DOS shell that used VESA for video. Most likely I still have the CD. If somebody would be interested, I will try to find it after the holiday and upload it.
This is what windows 1.0 should have been like .but even in 1996 windows 95 was very bloated for the time it seems well optimised compared to windows 11 but back in the mid 90s you needed a very new pc to run windows 95. most people couldn't afford to buy a new pc for a while they where still stuck with late 80s computers.
No, this is cooperative multitasking. That's not that crazy-- people have been doing it since the 50s. Pre-emptive multitasking is the hard one, where the operating systems quickly switches between each running application. This is almost certainly not that.
I like this concept! Breathing new life an old machine. (kind of like the "lite" Linux distros for older hardware) I'm going to download them and experiment with them on DOS VMs.👍👍
Making the most of the hardware over opulent graphic environments, which have ultimately forced hardware to insane specifications. Just to look pretty. This is brilliant for what it could do.
I can't imagine the amount fo software that is probably lost. I remember having some kind of interface to navigate dos that was invoked with the command cdx, which made everything super easy, so that me with 4 years was able to do stuff. Then the computer had to be formatted, and god knows who lend us the diskette with the cdx so we couldn't ask for it. And there it is. No more cdx for me.
That’s pretty neat. I’ve never heard of the software before. It makes me wonder in what dusty corner of the net did you locate it. It would be so cool if you could send Mr. Poole $23 and get something back. 😊
@@vwestlife Thank you very much for your reply. I do remember hearing that. I was imagining something a bit Indiana Jones-esque. I love your content. Have a great day! 😊
In the early 90s just after I learned C I delved into C++ and wrote a Window Manager in C++ that used the DOS character mode for drawing windows, menus, button and list controls etc. Unfortunately I lost the disk that source code was on... 😞
This is pretty cool, but not an operating system. It's a operating environment (DOS shell), which to his credit, he called it. Windows is also an operating environment, but it does come with the operating system DOS. OS/2 is a full operating system, with the environment. So comparing the size of it to the size of a complete operating system and environment is not exactly fair.
Hi, some thoughts of my own. I am a software developer using MS DOS-Compilers (MS-Business Basic Beta!, PDS Basic, C) from the 80s until today (seldom) on x86 machines. There were some of these DOS-useability-addons at the time, but none of them had a long life, except perhaps Norton Commander. This 'OS/5' never was an operating system but only an addon for PCDOS 7/MSDOS 6.1, written in VB-DOS. It's not multitasking because the PC-DOS it uses as a base is not capable of multitasking. It's only multi-windowed. At best You could call it 'serial multitasking' or time scheduled tasking, there is no parallelity like in real multitasking OSes . The only ever made (Interrupt-based) multitasking MS-DOS was the 1986 MS-DOS 4.0/4.1 only available for OEMs like Apricot, ICL etc. I had an Apricot 8086 at the time with that OS. The 'Visual Basic for DOS' was the (somewhat restricted - needs runtime, no link-libraries as far as I know) successor of the not much known 'Microsoft BASIC PDS 7.1 (Professional Development System)' that had a real machine llevel compiler and debugger and was capable of using link libraries. It didn't need any runtime components. All the above window / button etc. features were already included in PDS 7.1. I worked with that compiler for a very long time and wrote enterprise class (accounting software for distributors/retailers etc.) software using it.
Ah... IBM OS/2 runs perfectly fine on a 286 machine. I have an IBM Model 80 PC that has an Intel 80386 with 4Mb of memory that is running OS/2 Version 4 just fine.
@@pankoza _"yeah but only versions up to 1.30 support the 286"_ Huuh... That is funny, I have OS/2 version 3 running on a 286. Must be something wrong with version 3.
330k... heh. I'm writing a toy operating system for the Commodore 128... it is multitasking, multithreaded, and supports using a text based 'gui'. Without the gui component, it is now about 12k... of course that is all handwritten assembler, so bound to be a lot more compact... but it doesn't have an underlying 'OS' it can use for things like file access etc. Its still rather incomplete, and I'd expect it to grow quite a bit still, but should stay well within 32k.
...This was made with VBDOS wasn't it? I recognize that extraneous almost-windows theming anywhere. I made a number of utilities with VBDOS for my school when I was a student there. I both liked and hated how it looked. I felt like the UI controls were just too big, like buttons needing to be at least 3 lines vertical. Edit: That'll teach me to comment before watching the whole video. :)
Cool vid VW. I remember my Gateway 286 would not run windows 3 (not enough horsepower). Many, including myself ran DOS shells as an alternative. When Win 3 came out, there were still many many DOS & BASIC machines still out there & the newer Windows capable machines were very expensive.
This looks very similar to Turbo Vision. A framework used by many programs back then. It allowed creatng complex Windows-like text based user interfaces.
Borland's Turbo Vision was widely used by DOS programs in the '90s, and I actually prefer its more efficient use of screen real estate and better use of contrasting colors. But Visual BASIC for DOS is interesting in how hard they tried to make it look like a text-mode version of Windows.
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@@vwestlifeI was wondering if you know what this was we had a program for ms dos and instead of typing it made like a smart menu and you could start programs by linking them to a number. I think it was called smart menu I may have my diskette some were.
From what I can see, Visual Basic for DOS came out in 1992, two years after Turbo Vision. Microsoft probably got the idea from seeing Borland's product.
I love the fact that there was really a lot of thought and attention to detail put into this, even going as far to use darker blocks to replicate window shadows.
That was mandatory back then. You did not draw a pop-up window without a drop shadow. It just wasn't done.
Now, the controversy was whether you should use two blocks for the right-hand shadow, or just one, since the text-mode characters were twice as tall as they were wide. If you didn't have to worry about what was underneath (e.g., coloring the existing content underneath, vs. drawing your shadow on a solid background), then you could use the half-block box-drawing characters.
Similar considerations were necessary for the proper way to handle progress meters. There were ASCII characters with 25, 50, and 75% dithered fill, but some heathens decided just to fill the progress meter with a solid block the same color as the window background, like the progress bar was erasing all trace of its existence over time! Outrageous!
That would have just been provided by Visual Basic. This is just a high-school level application built on top of the services of VB.
Actually a lot of later DOS software did that.
I programmed something similar to this in QuickBasic as a kid so my technologically challenged parents could use their computer. It basically responded to what you did on the screen by writing to a batch file, exiting, running external programs and then returning back to the vaguely guiesque ANSI command centre
@@nickwallette6201At least back then you could see the edges of the danged windows. Now we're "modern" we're not allowed such fripperies!
This is exactly why we need the internet archive, stuff like this should be preserved for the future.
This operating system is actually quite easy to find, but not on Google. I don't know why people still use Google. It's one of the worst search engines now. This site is owned by google, SO, if I tell you where you CAN find this OS (in multiple places), Google will delete this post. There's more than one search engine. I can maybe give you a hint - COMRADE.
why ? waste of space for something nobody is using
@@TheCentaury You're wrong in two ways. First, the Internet is infinite in size and storage at this point. Second, operating systems aren't complicated because they have to genuinely be complicated, it's because they are poorly written. This little OS demonstrates that.
@@fuzzywzhe waste of space for something nobody is using and damn I'm so right
@@TheCentaury This video presentation on the operating system takes up more space than the actual os does.
It doesn't matter. We didn't make the Internet for you. We made is despite you.
Love that Dave's Garage explained it was too hard for Win95 to have seconds displayed on the tray clock, and here's this little guy that did it in '92 under DOS.
Microsoft is just adding this to Windows 11
Nope, it wasn't hard at all. They just didn't want to have the then-systems slowing down by updating the graphical text for the clock every second, thats what Dave explained in detail ;). This here runs in text mode, and isn't required to run other programs simultaneously (DOS16, Win16 and Win32)... so the comparison doesn't fit at all anyway ;)...
@@Lofote I watched his whole vid on that. Seems odd they couldn't work it out, but I guess there wasn't a big need for it. If you wanted a clock with seconds, there were plenty of apps that could add this function to the tray, or have a little window on-screen, anyway.
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Not a fair comparison at all. :-) Windows would've had to load the glyphs, measure each character's width (since they were variable-width), center it, etc.
Text-mode just threw the ASCII character codes into video RAM and called it a day. Exponentially less work.
That's really interesting. The UI screams that it's written in Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS. Edit: Thinking about it more, this is probably just a VB DOS program that has those built in functions (notepad, check register, etc.). It doesn't seem like there's a way to add a program for it. It just had a DOS shell for that. Given this came out in 1996, it's kind of a poor attempt at something like Deskmate, just with far fewer useful functions.
Jup, you are 100% right. All examples programs bolted together in one app. Coding part of the author? Probably a weekend. But man, i miss VBDOS
But you need to appreciate how he's named his program. His only mistake was to not include 'finder' somewhere for a good measure.
@@przemekkobel4874 😆 one word: Thunder Cougar Falconbird OS
Most of the "included" apps are just VBDOS demo apps (Check Manager, Calculator, Notepad, Chart, etc). EDIT: All are demo VBDOS apps come to think of it. He's just dumped them into one program.
Made in Visual Basic for DOS. Great text mode development environment, I used that a lot.
Same. I would still buy it if there was a similar version for modern desktops. Too bad it all fell into protected mode bs...
@@manuell3505 For small projects it was great, fast and easy to develop. There was of course memory limitations but one could easily use libraries and extended memory for this. Also, if I remember correctly there was a database engine calles ISAM that simplified database apps development.
Came here to say that. Used QBASIC quite a bit, but was very happy to switch to VB DOS when it came out. The clue is the file VBDRT10.EXE. That's the VB DOS runtime.
I was going to say - I recognised the widgets, borders and buttons and could tell it was a VBDOS app.
I always wanted the DOS version of VB, back in the day. Did MS really think people would buy it in big numbers?!
The king of DOS shells was DOS Navigator for me, ever since I learned about its existence. It launched into a Norton Commander clone by default, but it contained LOTS of features, including a text editor, a spreadsheet (!), a Tetris clone, a calculator, a phone book, a CD player, a serial terminal emulator, on top of everything you'd expect from an orthodox file manager. Only the archive file support was a little lackluster, as it relied entirely on calling into external programs. But best of all, it was written using Turbo Vision, so all those features could run concurrently, in overlapping windows much like these.
It was larger of course, spanning about a megabyte installed with all those features, but it made a much more full-featured and usable environment.
DOS Navigator was very interesting, but I preferred something minimalistic with only the features that are absolutely needed. Have you ever heard of an Ukrainian Norton Commander clone called Volkov Commander? It was a complete clone of NC 3.0 with some features of NC 4.0 and some extra features not present in either (like TSR programs memory map). It was writen completely in assembly language and took below 60K on disk (the executable file only, without the online help file) and the resident portion took only about 5K of RAM, if I remember correctly, so you could run programs with quite big memory requirements without having to exit it (as it was sometimes needed with the actual NC). Great thing, was very popular among my colleagues back then...
@@0raj0 Back in the 90s, the time of rampant piracy, I stumbled upon a version of "Norton Commander" that used suspiciously little disk space, and generally felt a little bit odd, although was fully functional for the most part. After some digging I learned that it was actually Volkov Commander that somebody hacked by replacing the string "Volkov" with "Norton". I later learned that Volkov Commander itself was nothing shady but a perfectly legitimate product.
But I never actually used it properly. I actually started my journey with NC5, and then migrated to DN - as a DOS shell whenever I needed one because that was already the time of using Win9x as the daily driver. I never really had much need for something as lightweight as VC.
I still occasionally use Midnight Commander on Linux and macOS for various tasks.
PopDos is the one.
What fun and trouble this very small Dos-disk!
Still have a copy just for fun in storage. Haven't used it in some time, it like traveling back in time to the Day's when the world was innocent for people just willing to learn new things.
Thanks for your text Bro.🙏🏾🇹🇹.
Reminds me about Borland Turbo Vision for Pascal and C++. About the same time, as it was initially released in 1990
Are you familiar with BRIEF? My dad used that forever...
Borland Turbo vision was quite a bit older than this.
This is definitely interesting, I wonder what John Poole is doing nowadays.
Probably waiting for VWestlife's $25+inflation registration check to arrive by mail.
@@Dsun4456 I wonder if he still lives there? Obviously the email address isn't going to work now.
@@Dsun4456 He had to send $50 because he has BOTH versions! 😜 With inflation it's $97!
Probably toiling in the WinMines to pay off all the lawsuits Microsoft won against him.
According to a brief search, he's assistant night shift co-manager of the Dairy Queen in the town of Lick Skillet, Alabama and he's 26. Or, he's a retired RAF Air Marshal and just turned 106 years young in his beautiful home in Bakewell, Derbyshire, England. My search my have been too brief. 😁
Very interesting, it’s actually quite complex considering how little space it takes up. Nice to see this is now preserved and won’t be lost to time, great video!
But it isn't a operating system, it is a shell with some internal applications ;)... And there were other programs that could do most of it on similar machines, like Microsoft Works for DOS, etc.
Yes 👍
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True, it is a shell... But if it contains the preemptive multitasker it could be considered a rudimentary OS. But considering that it is running on a x286 suggests that it is real mode so it will be a shell and rely on the DOS OS for everything.
Windows 3 + OS/2 = OS/5? It looks like a cute project but pretty limited in features. I wonder if the full version came with source so you could add stuff.
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Oh man, you have no idea... :-) Under the right circumstances, this would've slayed. Expectations weren't very high back then.
It's miles ahead of the DOS Shell in terms of features (although, DOS Shell had a fancy multitasker that would've been tricky to implement.) It's similar to Tandy's DeskMate, which no doubt moved its fair share of Tandy 1000s in store demos. And it's nearly as useful as Windows 2.0.
About the only thing it's missing -- and frankly, this is kind of a big thing -- is support for loadable applications. I'm guessing this is all monolithic, and the apps that are built-in are the entirety of the OS/5 ecosystem. But, if Mr. Poole had come up with a loader to pull chunks of code from other files into memory, and execute them as a first-class application with full windowing API support and all that... whew.
There was a period of time where Windows was considered too big and heavy for a lot of users. It was an aspirational OS. ("OS" -- really just more of a shell at that time, since it required DOS to run. An "operating _environment, "_ if you will.) Quite a bit of work was being done in single-tasking DOS applications, because graphics cards and high-resolution (sic) monitors were expensive, and the memory and CPU requirements were significant for the time. A text-mode windowing system like this would've been a very decent compromise, that allowed multi-tasking, clipboard support, file management, and background printing -- often all things that users would graft on, piecemeal, via TSRs, in some kind of Frankenstein's Monster fashion.
The crucial factor, as always, would be whether anyone wrote applications for it. If this had been developed commercially, with continuous development, support, and (most importantly) a sense that it would still exist in a few years -- and thus making it a worthwhile target for 3rd parties -- well, it still may have been hardly more than a footnote. Titans fell on this point alone, more often than not.
@@nickwallette6201 This shell would have been viable in the late 1980s and very early 1990s. By 1996 when this was released used 486 machines that ran Windows 3.1 perfectly fine were quite affordable, even new ones weren't that expensive. Pentiums were but that changed quickly as well. A year later my school bought a load of 25 IBM PS/VP 486 DX/2 66 boasting 8 MB of RAM and 250 MB hard drives for a song and they felt pretty outdated by the time. Few people in industrialised countries were still forced to use DOS on XTs and 286s in 1996.
I would love to get my hands on the source and add to it.
@@nickwallette6201 this was probably waaaay too little and too late for the party. The FM is *extremely* basic even compared to DOS Shell and you can't even add shortcuts for your everyday DOS sotfware, having to use the prompt to do any serious work anyway. Also... 1996. Even my school's outdated computers could run Windows 3.x comfortably, with MS Office and other useful applications. And adding loadable software support was probably a much more complex task than the entire application that was delivered.
By the way, you might be interested in DESQView. The first version came out in 1984, was a text-mode interface with resizeable windows and could run regular DOS applications with multitasking (even in real mode, though later versios could leverage protected mode and extended memory when coupled with QEMM/386)
Thank you for sharing this with us! It's really cool to have this interesting piece of history archived, and it makes me wonder if there's any other tech history that's still yet to be uncovered.
Very interesting. I had not heard of this before. Sad it did not take off at the time.
Thanks for the video.
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It didn't take off because it wasn't very useful, I guess. It was also pretty late to the party, even though the video claims that "John Poole was way ahead of his time". If you want to see how something like this was done properly and a decade earlier, take a look at Framework III by Ashton-Tate. It's a CUI-based DOS office package.
Take off? This DOS shell is just a novelty, albeit a cool one. It's something like a competitor to Windows 1.0 done over a decade later (in an era when computing evolved at twice or more the pace it does today). It's nice, but not universally useful for the time period.
People forget that at this time there were still a lot of people actively using PCs that were too old to run Windows 95, and maybe even were a bit on the slow side for Windows 3.1. There was a pretty nice little niche market for DOS shells that covered this sort of use case. I wouldn't call this an OS by any stretch but it looks like it would have made a great DOS shell on these lower end PCs.
Obviously not an IBM product but i wonder if John Poole ever got into legal trouble because of the name and how similar it sounds like OS/2.
And the wannabe Windows Logo at startup.
Did Microsoft send him to heaven by car accident?
If he had made any real money from it, or it had become a real rival, I am betting they would have sued. But it probably wasn't worth suing someone over this. Probably got a cease and desist letter from them.
When you can't even find any info on the internet about this program, you can tell this little project did not exactly make waves. Its existence was most probably an anecdote, so it likely went under the radar.
@@BilisNegra Shareware, wonder if it came with the baggie?
I created many utilities in VB for DOS, back in 1992-94. Also used a textual UI library for C called TUICP. I might even still have my floppy disks with that stuff... But no floppy drive.
Get a USB floppy drive (provided it's on 3½" disks) and make backups of them. They won't stay readable forever!
Very true.Just this week I opened a box of old floppies because I wanted to use them on my vintage RiscStation R7500 and of the 10 I tested only one worked even though they were sealed and stored well.
Somebody made a similar open source project for a Doctor Dobb's Journal article.
@@electroman1996 True, I recently dug out some disks I made back in the 1990s, and back then I made further backup sets of the source files but only one set out of a few sets still worked, so I made sure to extract the remaining working set onto my PC to make some new backups. Some of my original floppies were made using a proprietry disk compression format on an Atari STE, making the disks specific to that machine's drive only and not even another Atari STE would be able to read it. This was back when I was trying to get as much storage out of a 720KB DS/DD as possible, and did not have the luxury of a hard disk, CD writer etc.
@@EgoShredder oh yeah, I remember trying to squeeze as much data as possible onto floppies on my Atari STFM, often formatting them with 86 tracks of 11 sectors each. That was already pushing it a bit too far, but if you tried any more tracks the head would make an unhealthy sounding click...
Huh! What a neat little program/environment. I'm gonna give this a try on my PPC640 to see how it looks on a monochrome CGA LCD for fun.
I've run windows 2.03 on a ppc512 from floppy, it's pretty wild.
Works totally fine in MDA and CGA on a NEC V30 @ 8MHz! Gotta give it that!
Dude that background music is SO SMOOTH!
I am very glad you preserved this. About 30 years ago there where a lot of these sorts of programs that used what Code Page 437 had to offer. Yes, you could make a "semi-graphical" UI out of CP-437 ! One I used back then after trying out a bunch I downloaded from a BBS was the (IIRC) "Nickl Menu System" that looked amazing on MDA. So many of these have been lost.
MDA ftw. Actually, I can top that: the AT&T/Olivetti 640x400 monochrome "CGA compatible"
For software that supported it, the resolution was fantastic. Windows/286 supported it; unfortunately I never found an Autocad DOS driver, so that plodded along at CGA res.
That looks dope! Never seen or used OS/5 before, so this was incredibly fascinating!
Actually works shockingly well. I could see this being useful for owners of older PCs that couldn't run windows effectively or wanted something a little simpler
Mr. Poole was doing retro computing ahead of time.
This is seriously impressive given the limitations of text mode and what you could fit on a single 720k floppy. Sweet drop shadows on everything too
wait until you see the QNX demo floppy
"OS/5 Alive" has got to be a Batteries Not Included reference. OS/5 was really well done, Poole took his time to get this right. It was great to see this run in 43-line EGA and 50-line VGA mode, that really opened it up. I would love to see this run on a PC or XT, off a 5.25" floppy, with real CGA and snow. I just might have to give that a shot.
or short circuit "Johhny 5's Alive!"
On my Tandy 1000SX, which is about 30% faster than the original IBM PC, it's a bit sluggish but acceptable. I haven't tried OS/5 on a real IBM CGA card in a long time, but I don't think it suffers from "snow".
For clarification, this is not an operating system but rather an operating environment and there were many such environments including GeoWorks, GEM, and TopView to name just a few.
Very cool though!
I was just thinking about that and commented somewhere else. Technically it/they are shells rather than an OS, but if they are running in protected mode they can exhibit OS abilities. Windows 1.0 to 3.1 functioned similar to this.
I'm a computer user/programmer/system programmer/architect etc from 1985 till today. And I never heard about OS/5. Very interesting...
It kinda looks more like a school project rather than a rival to Windows 95.
And it it were, any kid who can create something like this has earned a full scholarship to the best university of his/her choice.
From my personal experience schools were more into Pascal at the time and were far less ambitious. This feels far more like someone teaching them self Visual Basic for Dos and they managed to create a Dos desktop.
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@@manolokonosko2868 They're relying a lot on what their development environment provided, just using it pretty effectively, so a reasonable accomplishment, but certainly not worth $20, especially when that $20 would've been more like $50. :p Definitely could've been something a well-determined student could've done in high school, or certainly university level student.
@@Aeduo I was thinking that was a bit stiff for what it was. If it had been released in 1990 for $5, it might have stood a chance of going somewhere.
looks like that would run on a old school remote boot ms dos network, many thanks for showing this!
So it isnt an operating system - it is a shell or interface that operates OVER DOS.
For what seems to be a one-person project, it's actually quite impressive. :)
It's no surprise that it didn't catch on, though. In 96, a much more sophisticated Windows 95 was already established for about a year. Hardly anyone would pick anything else for home and office, at that point.
I really love the use of the sound library for this one. It really gives that beach-ey ‘90s corpo-educational film vibe.
"[...] Such as the calculator... Which can't divide by zero"
- VWestlife, 2023
Its basically the same as a Casio scientific calculator.
Looks remarkably like a Visual BASIC for DOS project, perhaps by an ambitious young programmer with limited resources (like me).
Yeah, I'm fairly sure (although it's been a long time since I used it), that the "Control Panel" and "Chart" features are based on samples that came with VB for DOS.
At 7:56 it shows vbdrt10.exe, a companion file for visual basic dos applications and in the readme it lists it as a required file for installation
Edit: i guess we should all watch the entire video before commenting lol
@@mallardtheduck1 It's VB 1.0 for sure. When reviewing the readme at 06:56, you can see the Visual Basic Runtime 1.0 exe in the folder. VWestLife even talks about it starting 13:25
@@mallardtheduck1 I'm 100% sure it's from VBDOS... I loved this programming tool ! :)
@@olivierpericat9224 Ditto. I will never forget its look and feel. At the peak of my QuickBASIC days I eventually discovered Visual Basic for MS-DOS 1.0 and thus got into properly programming TUIs under DOS (after being used to writing these routines myself and without any mouse support).
"operating system" is probably overselling it a bit, but it's a neat GUI for what it is.
I wrote tons of software utilities for DOS using Visual Basic for DOS back in the day! This is total nostalgia for me. LOL!
Wow. Not only is this the only mention on the web for OS/5, it is the only mention of John Poole Software. There are of course several John Pooles (it is a common name) who work with various aspects of software, but every one I checked was far too young to be the John Poole we are looking for.
I also searched for it and found the same thing. I would really like to know more about this software or this guy.
My friend and I did the same. He wrote replacement shell for MS-DOS (even had file search) and I wrote those visual apps like an editor and other things. It was somewhere 2000-01. Good old times...
Do you still have a copy? Or maybe other interesting programs that you and your friend wrote?
@@CarlosPCmx unfortunately I don't have it. It was 23y ago when we were just a teenage kids.
I like it, looks very much like a one man project or something you would make at programming school
Thanks for archiving it on your website. Now I just have to figure out how to put it on a 5.25 so I can play with it on my IBM.
have a floppy burner
@@SamOlds2999That sounds painful.
or a cd or dvd @@vwestlife
what do u mean@@vwestlife
You know its a good day when vwestlife uploads
I had a boxed copy of VB for dos! Made my own simple DOS shell with it when I was a kid too haha, I recognized the text mode UI style as soon as it game up on screen!
Really cool to see that someone went ahead and built something far more comprehensive.
VB DOS also could compile QuickBasic/QBasic programs too, which was also a big plus for a lot of people.
VB for DOS will certainly compile QuickBasic/QBasic code, it will even compile GW-BASIC code!
QBX 7.1 also comes with the toolkit to build IDEs like this.
2:01 That 90s infomercial background music is really on point!
Divide by zero would be a killer feature for sure. 😎
At any rate. Very impressive stuff.
That’s amazing for something that fits on a single floppy disk.
While it looks like something I would've scoffed at back in 1996, nowadays I can totally understand someone with a weaker machine wanting to use this. I now appreciate when a developer creates something anyone can run on anything. This is so helpful for vintage PC's now.
This reminds me of when my friends and I discovered QuickBASIC in the late 90's and used it on old PS/2 Model 30 units to make our own windowing "OS" just like this.
bring the quickbasic up
i subbed to you
Lots of people were into making their own windowing GUI and desktop environments back then. I was the developer of a multitasking DOS desktop environment called X-GUI that ran its own scripted code programmed in QBasic back around 1999-2000s for example and had a lot of fun programming that software utilizing the Zephyr SVGAQB graphics library to support full color high resolution screen modes for old computers. PDS 7.1 and VBDOS both backward compatible with QuickBASIC was heavily used at that time and I programmed my installers in that along with much of my source code even though most of the time I didn't use the VB additions of it simply because I felt its compiler were more robust if I recall compared to some restraints 4.5 had.
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> DOS Based
> DOS Shell
Hey everyone! Look! It''s an entirely separate operating system!
Someone might have preferred this particular implementation, but this does not look like an especially unique piece of software. Back then, there were dozens of DOS launchers and menu programs, many of which supported various implementations of multitasking. This one is obviously drawing inspiration from Windows 3.1, which was also not an operating system, though was a much closer approximation than what we've got here.
I recognize alot of that - he made it using Visual Basic for DOS. Some of the stuff like the Control Panel are Demo projects.
This was meant to be an alternative OS for older DOS machines especially when Microsoft stopped supporting MS-DOS mainstream and switched to Windows! It’s good for those IBM machines and clones. Probably there was lawsuit from IBM or Microsoft to not use their copyrighted files and trademarks, is why it was scrubbed from the internet and not publicly available because of copyright issues!
Borland Sidekick had a lot of the same functionality 10 years earlier. It ran as a TSR so could run on top of other DOS programs. From memory it allowed rudimentary cut and paste between apps (either that or I'm thinking of DESQview) using a screen grabber/keyboard stuffer.
thank you for including captions ❤🎉
Thanks for archiving this piece of history.
TurboPascal feel. forgot what the windowing system was called, but feels so identical. used that to create text mode uis for sometools, but never a desktop tool.
turbovision as someone responded.
vb for dos, lol
Props for the truly 90's background music
..We have OS/2 at home
So in 98/99 I built something like this just for myself, just because all I had was a 486 25Mhz SX and programming skills I wanted to use. It also helped that I wasn't really doing my home work and was spending manner of hours doing this stuff until 4 in the morning.
I figured it was nothing special and it is probably on an old 120MB HDD somewhere in a rubbish heap.
Mind you I basically coded it in one giant linear chunk of code, applications and all. So it was an absolute mess of code that you couldn't expand on easily at all. I also never really documented anything so I remember going back into it about a year later only to realize I had no idea how any of it worked. Ah to be 14-15 again...
never even heard of this one, thanks!
Looks like a better operating system than Windows 11
This is like the long list cousin to windows 3.11 and early MacOS
Very cool and interesting.
There's a text based desktop environment for Linux too, multiple of them in fact that I could only assume are based on this idea.
Around the late 1990s, QNX (QuickuNiX)had a couple of floppies that had complete OS and either a modem or ethernet connection and autodetection of devices. Tthere was a (fairly rudimentary) web browser. I found the modem version pretty much bulletproof while the network version had a limited selection of network cards.
Wish I had a "real" copy of this to put on my shelf. Text mode GUI is such a cool concept, I wish there were more products like this.
Very cool. Love the music choice.
But I do love Gem that has a mac like desktop interface. Gem was pretty small too.
That looks like something I wrote in Visual Basic for dos around that same time period. And, while everything compiled inside the same executable can run together, you can't run other programs and have them run concurrently. I realize you already pointed this out. But, alas.
A very clever program, and props to him for doing it.
Love how the left-hand menu so closely mirrors the one you'd see within Windows w/ Alt-Space. Hell, the one that's *still* there in modern Windows.
*Edit:* Firefox wants me to know that downloading OS/5 is a security risk because it wasn't sent via TLS. The people that wrote that message weren't even alive when DOS was popular, I reckon.
I mean, it is. Many people use public Wi-Fi networks without thinking twice, that warning is well needed. If it helps, the Wayback Machine can serve as a proxy of sorts for that.
There's a game creation tool called MegaZeux that uses ASCII art for graphics, and I remember one of the "games" for it was a graphical interface in the style of Windows 95. (It was mostly a novelty thing, but still pretty impressive)
Did you ever play ZZT? Or Kroz? Both games used the ANSI character set to do graphics in text mode. The Kroz series were all pre done dungeon crawl / puzzle games. ZZT had game levels included but its big draw was its built in editor and scripting language so people could make their own levels. There were a lot of user made levels and complete multi level games.
There was a way to lock user created content to keep it from being edited but it was stupid simple to remove the protection with a hex editor. IIRC the word SECRET was in the level file near the beginning and replacing that with zeroes made the file modifiable with the ZZT editor.
@@greggv8 I think the point Fuzy2K is trying to make is that MegaZeux's additional features make simulating a desktop far more viable (especially given that its current devs partially unshackled it from text mode limitations with features like unbound sprites). It would be quite a struggle to pull something like that off with ZZT-OOP.
And yep, you remember well! Replacing SECRET with anything else would unlock a protected world. You can also type "?+DEBUG" while in the game, as debug mode will disable the world lock check. There were also a couple other world locks developed by third parties, such as setting the saved game flag (0x108), all of which are just as easy to defeat if you know where to look.
@@greggv8 I love ZZT! My favorite ZZT game was ESP: Evil Sorcerer's Party
That looks like an April fool's program. It's just a *very* primitive GUI. Also, did you notice that restoring a minimized app will reset it (content is lost)?
There were so many of such GUIs back in the day. I always rather used the DOS Shell that came with MS-DOS, which is way more powerful that what most people are aware of.
It was mostly a programming exercise to see what could be done with Visual BASIC for DOS. But it's extremely rare to find anything made using VBDOS. Apparently even Microsoft never used it for their own DOS programs.
From the title of the video I mistakenly thought this was some long lost operating system that Microsoft never released. But turns out it is a GUI shell which is still kind of interesting. As you mentioned, there were a lot of these types of GUI shells that ran on top of DOS. I recall seeing many of them in shareware catalogs. My favorite one was Neosoft Quikmenu III.
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I very much appreciate you bringing lost and unknown software to light, and making them available, but I wish the realities of UA-cam didn't force you to describe these as operating systems, as they aren't (the documentation read at 1:15 clearly states they are just DOS shell/menu programs). I do appreciate the vibe you were going for though.
I was thinking the same, back in the day we had all sorts of dos menu systems.
But the full name of the program is "Operating System/5 Desktop". And by 1996 Microsoft had already muddied the waters of what counts as an "operating system" by calling Windows 95 one even though it's still just a GUI running on top of MS-DOS.
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@@vwestlife That's... a really dubious assertion. Windows 95 was a hybrid. It did rely on DOS to a degree, but a BIG part of that was because it would've been suicide to enforce a complete separation from DOS at that point. One of Win95's selling points was that you could continue to use DOS in whatever way made sense -- windowed sessions, full-screen sessions under Windows, or rebooting into a pure DOS environment.
I'm sure there were equal parts "let's leverage some of the work we've already done to get this product out the door" and "if we clean the slate, we'll break compatibility." But I think that was deliberate.
The pendulum has swung, from the initial "OMG it's a totally new ground-up 32-bit revolution in desktop computing" to "you're not fooling me, it's just Windows 3.x with new a new skin" and I think that pessimism should have run its course by now. The MS devs have blogged about this plenty, and explained how Win95 CAN offload a lot of I/O and things to -DOS- (edit: actually, let's just say "to real-mode") ..... _if it needs to,_ to support drivers loaded in config sys, or other 16-bit code. But it's really not _that_ far from being entirely independent either.
Now, calling Windows 3.1 an operating system.... *that* would be muddy water indeed. Even though, in all fairness, it really did lobotomize DOS quite a bit as well, with optional 32-bit I/O, its own memory management, etc.
@@nickwallette6201 Caldera proved in court that you could separate the Windows 95 GUI from MS-DOS and run it on top of DR-DOS instead.
I can already see cs188 making a ytp of this. So many references.
Thank you so much for this video and this amazing find. I'm learning x86 assembly for fun and I'm using turbo debugger etc all the time. Now I can run everything inside OS/5, so much more fun and easy. Awesome interface, I'm in love with it. Super excited and grateful.
sad we didn't to use OS more. I remember reading studies where a machine used daily would average an uptime over 2 months before needing a reboot to clean out the temp files and cache.
I noticed between versions they went from the shift-insert method of pasting to the Ctrl-v version of pasting.
It was pretty common to support both. But the keyboard shortcut shown in the menu would have to be one or the other, of course.
@@nickwallette6201 to this day Shift+Insert is supported on Windows, believe it or not
The music is on point for a demonstration of ANY OS, but it really fits the DOS years.
That is so cool! I never even knew there was a DOS-based operating system, complete with a text-based interface. I am surprised that they did not release this much earlier. Had OS/5 been released in the late 1980s-early 1990s, this probably would have been a best seller despite of having very little graphical features. I bet OS/5 might even run under Windows 95, 98 and even Me. This rare program deserves to be archived on the Internet Archive. I am also surprised that Microsoft did not sue OS/5 for making up their own version of the "Windows" logo since it looks similar.
@WeatherSTARIII - you mean IBM. MS dropped OS/2 during the feud with IBM over Windows 3.x.
@@jroysdon I know IBM had later taken over the production of OS/2 in the 1990s, but I was referring to OS/5 for DOS from this video, not OS/2.
Absolutely love the music selection :)
Cool, never heard of this one. DesQview had many similar features, and could also multitask its own apps, and even many regular dos apps and in some cases, you could cut and paste between different apps. It's probably better known than OS/5 but doesn't get the kind of retro-love it deserves, you should do a video on it. I'm always impressed at just how good a text based UI can be, the old Borland products had the same kind of deal/could be used to make Windows-like interfaces.
Will try it on my Tandy 1000 EX with a 360K floppy, thanks!
'Operating System' seems a bit of a stretch, but the multi-tasking is impressive. I kind of like that someone went to this much effort to bring such a functional piece of software to users of old computers while IBM and MS were pushing the boundaries (and the bloat). I guess we'll never know what happend to OS/3 and OS/4.
DOS shells were dime a dozen back in those days. Calling this an OS is an insult to real alternative OSes like GeoWorks.
It's not multi-tasking... It's just multiple windows in one app.
It’s hilarious to see someone call features that are taken for granted now bloat.
Really goes to show how that word has zero meaning, it’s just “things I don’t like and can’t explain why”!
@@JollyGiant19 I wasn't talking about features, I was talking about inefficient coding. With the product cycle Microsoft had, using the same codebase to develop the next OS, it was impossible for them not to include obsolete code.
There were many good DOS-only shareware programs in the 1990s that had features that some windoze programs wouldn't have for a decade or more. My college used Buttonware (PC Type, PC Calc, PC File) because the registered shareware cost less than Microshart DOeSn't Works. PC Type had the ability to block copy and paste text (copying text much like copying spreadsheet cells) instead of editing line by line in most DOS or windoze text editors.
A quick search produced three different John Pooles in the software industry, but likely none of them are the same person (one in Canada, one in the UK, one in Australia).
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@@SamOlds2999 Do you have nothing better to do?
This reminded me that I had downloaded a DOS shell called "Black OS NG" (or something like that) maybe in 2005 and wrote it to a CD. If I remember correctly the software was free and it has been developed in 2004. Its look was somewhat similar to the default LXDE theme with a black taskbar but it was a DOS shell that used VESA for video. Most likely I still have the CD. If somebody would be interested, I will try to find it after the holiday and upload it.
Please do.
Foxpro let one use a mouse and windows in text mode, but a whole operating system based on this is something new!
It’s not an operating system, it’s a shell on top of DOS, there were other similar products that were more well known.
This is what windows 1.0 should have been like .but even in 1996 windows 95 was very bloated for the time it seems well optimised compared to windows 11 but back in the mid 90s you needed a very new pc to run windows 95. most people couldn't afford to buy a new pc for a while they where still stuck with late 80s computers.
At around 3:50 I believe you state that this is a "multitasking interface", I think a better description is a task switching interface.
No, this is cooperative multitasking. That's not that crazy-- people have been doing it since the 50s.
Pre-emptive multitasking is the hard one, where the operating systems quickly switches between each running application. This is almost certainly not that.
That background music makes me feel like I'm watching The Video Professor. 😅
Music in background perfectly fit with 90es
Interesting! I would have put this on my 8088 and it would have given me a bit more enjoyment out of it as a kid.
I like this concept! Breathing new life an old machine. (kind of like the "lite" Linux distros for older hardware) I'm going to download them and experiment with them on DOS VMs.👍👍
Making the most of the hardware over opulent graphic environments, which have ultimately forced hardware to insane specifications. Just to look pretty. This is brilliant for what it could do.
11:37 probably a misspelling of "shredder", which usually refers to a program that securly deletes files by overwriting them, oftennin several passes.
loved that background music!
This is Very Cool , Thank you for the Video and this Look at John Pools GUI :) QC
I can't imagine the amount fo software that is probably lost. I remember having some kind of interface to navigate dos that was invoked with the command cdx, which made everything super easy, so that me with 4 years was able to do stuff. Then the computer had to be formatted, and god knows who lend us the diskette with the cdx so we couldn't ask for it. And there it is. No more cdx for me.
Before I watched this video I had never even caught a whisper of this OS. Knew about OS/2 but not this one.
That’s pretty neat. I’ve never heard of the software before. It makes me wonder in what dusty corner of the net did you locate it. It would be so cool if you could send Mr. Poole $23 and get something back. 😊
As I said in the video, I downloaded it from CompuServe back in the day and kept a copy of it on an old hard drive all these years.
@@vwestlifethank you for sharing this after so long. ❤
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@@SamOlds2999bruh…
@@vwestlife Thank you very much for your reply. I do remember hearing that. I was imagining something a bit Indiana Jones-esque. I love your content. Have a great day! 😊
I really like the editing and the pacing of this video.
In the early 90s just after I learned C I delved into C++ and wrote a Window Manager in C++ that used the DOS character mode for drawing windows, menus, button and list controls etc. Unfortunately I lost the disk that source code was on... 😞
This is pretty cool, but not an operating system. It's a operating environment (DOS shell), which to his credit, he called it. Windows is also an operating environment, but it does come with the operating system DOS. OS/2 is a full operating system, with the environment. So comparing the size of it to the size of a complete operating system and environment is not exactly fair.
Hi, some thoughts of my own. I am a software developer using MS DOS-Compilers (MS-Business Basic Beta!, PDS Basic, C) from the 80s until today (seldom) on x86 machines.
There were some of these DOS-useability-addons at the time, but none of them had a long life, except perhaps Norton Commander.
This 'OS/5' never was an operating system but only an addon for PCDOS 7/MSDOS 6.1, written in VB-DOS.
It's not multitasking because the PC-DOS it uses as a base is not capable of multitasking. It's only multi-windowed. At best You could call it 'serial multitasking' or time scheduled tasking, there is no parallelity like in real multitasking OSes .
The only ever made (Interrupt-based) multitasking MS-DOS was the 1986 MS-DOS 4.0/4.1 only available for OEMs like Apricot, ICL etc. I had an Apricot 8086 at the time with that OS.
The 'Visual Basic for DOS' was the (somewhat restricted - needs runtime, no link-libraries as far as I know) successor of the not much known 'Microsoft BASIC PDS 7.1 (Professional Development System)' that had a real machine llevel compiler and debugger and was capable of using link libraries. It didn't need any runtime components.
All the above window / button etc. features were already included in PDS 7.1.
I worked with that compiler for a very long time and wrote enterprise class (accounting software for distributors/retailers etc.) software using it.
Ah... IBM OS/2 runs perfectly fine on a 286 machine. I have an IBM Model 80 PC that has an Intel 80386 with 4Mb of memory that is running OS/2 Version 4 just fine.
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yeah but only versions up to 1.30 support the 286
prove theres version 1.3@@pankoza
@@pankoza _"yeah but only versions up to 1.30 support the 286"_ Huuh... That is funny, I have OS/2 version 3 running on a 286. Must be something wrong with version 3.
@@SamOlds2999 _"prove there's version 1.3 "_ I would post a link to the picture of the 1.3 diskettes but youtube doesn't allow links.
330k... heh. I'm writing a toy operating system for the Commodore 128... it is multitasking, multithreaded, and supports using a text based 'gui'. Without the gui component, it is now about 12k... of course that is all handwritten assembler, so bound to be a lot more compact... but it doesn't have an underlying 'OS' it can use for things like file access etc. Its still rather incomplete, and I'd expect it to grow quite a bit still, but should stay well within 32k.
The last time someone wrote a toy operating system it conquered the world...
@@damouzeI wouldn't say temple os took over the world. Oh, you meant Linus' os...
@@damouze I'm not sure that was 'last time'... but yeah... it happened 🙂
Not exactly counting on that to happen for this toy OS.
@@JaredConnell Haha, temple os.
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...This was made with VBDOS wasn't it? I recognize that extraneous almost-windows theming anywhere. I made a number of utilities with VBDOS for my school when I was a student there. I both liked and hated how it looked. I felt like the UI controls were just too big, like buttons needing to be at least 3 lines vertical.
Edit: That'll teach me to comment before watching the whole video. :)
Cool vid VW. I remember my Gateway 286 would not run windows 3 (not enough horsepower). Many, including myself ran DOS shells as an alternative. When Win 3 came out, there were still many many DOS & BASIC machines still out there & the newer Windows capable machines were very expensive.