DOS Shell

The DOS Shell is a file manager, the 4.0 in June 1988 was first available in MS -DOS and PC DOS. The program was not developed to the MS- DOS version 6.0. On the " Supplemental Disk " it was an add-on from Microsoft to continue to be delivered to the DOS version 6.22. From IBM, it was maintained in PC-DOS to PC DOS 2000.

Features

Like other file manager you can use the DOS shell copy, move and rename and launch applications with a double click. You can start the program dosshell through the command line. It is possible to use simple colors and styles. The DOS Shell was one of the first successful attempts to create a GUI file manager in DOS, since graphical modes were available with VGA on computers. But it is rather more a character -oriented user interface or a Character Oriented Windows (COW ). The DOS shell corresponds to the appearance of a DOS version of the Windows File Manager.

The shell has a help function, program list via Task switching and a TSR support. It is capable of displaying, the two directory hierarchies and file lists. A mouse is supported, but a suitable instrument driver is as with other DOS applications required.

An outstanding ability that all files can be viewed on a hard drive in a single alphabetical list, along with the path and the other attributes. This allows the user to compare versions of a file in different directories with their attributes and easily discover redundancies.

Problems

There are several reasons why the DOS Shell was no longer used:

• Multitasking was not supported. Between programs running in memory, you could switch (task switching), but the system was much slower. All running programs had to share the conventional memory area because there was no support for paging or swapping to disk.
• Windows 3.1 with its own graphical user interface was much more popular among computer users. Windows was able to multitask and more stable. Its performance was with the access to the entire system RAM is much higher.