[Don Joe]

I can't speak for JPL but back in the DOS days you could do an aweful lot with small files. Adding graphical interfaces and fancy stuff on cumputers takes up alot of space

I wrote a DOS shell -- GUI, but character-mode-based -- that fit on two 360kb floppies (or one 720K floppy) for distribution.

It included a DOS menuing system, a GUI configuration program (for creating your DOS app menu entries), a graphical file manager (including a full licenced copy of PKZIP/UNZIP, with a GUI frontend I wrote), and an "in-program" cooperative multitasker (for maintaining the on-screen clock display and animated background).

It also included a Windows 3.x component that I wrote, to allow you to run Windows apps from DOS. My shell would launch Windows, run the selected application, and then sit silently in the background, monitoring your app. When you closed your app, my code would terminate Windows, and put you back in the DOS shell. (It also had options to stay in Windows when your app ended, or, query you as to whether to remain in Windows or return to DOS.) I added that because at that time, many people didn't have a lot of Windows apps, and only went into Windows for the express purpose of running a single program, and they'd go back to DOS when they were done.

Yes, you could do a lot in a little bit of space back then. (Both disk space, and RAM. My shell worked on computers with 640 KB RAM.)

I gave up on my shell when Windows 95 came out and I could see the handwriting on the wall. I'd had a distributor all lined up, too, hot to start publishing it, too. Timing is everything, argh.

[AppauledAtAppeasementConservat]

"I gave up on my shell when Windows 95 came out and I could see the handwriting on the wall. I'd had a distributor all lined up, too, hot to start publishing it, too. Timing is everything, argh."

Me too unfortunately. I used to program in turbo pascal and the closest thing I ever had was a boot up disk I created with a cool photo of Jupiter and a text to speech for PC speaker synthasizer that 'said' everything that it was doing from the menus. Still helps though to know dos even nowadays. All that fit on a 720k floppy and a mini menu system (but not as sophisticated as yours) with lharc file archiver and various other dos utilities. I also had a cut down version of it that had the basic turbo pascal compiler and tasm with the essential libraries and some of my custom code libraries for programming on the road/fly if need be. Both I used to use in computer lab in HS to play games or program when I had some free time.