Dos Navigator

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DOS Navigator

Dos Navigator is a free orthodox File Manager for DOS and Windows.

1 Influence of Dos Navigator
2 History
3 Life after Dos Navigator
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Influence of Dos Navigator

Dos Navigator is an influential early implementation of orthodox File Manager (OFM). By implementing three additional types of Virtual file system (VFS): Xtree, Briefcase and List-based, DN opened a new generation of OFMs. Also unlimited number of panels and a lot of new important features make it one of the most powerful (and complex) OFM^[1]. It should be considered probably as an ultimate DOS-based classic implementation of OFM and it is difficult to compete with DN featurewise under DOS.

[edit] History

The initial version of DN I (v 0.90) was released in 1991 and written by Stefan Tanurkov, Andrew Zabolotny and Sergey Melnik (all from Kishinev, Moldova). After that DN was rewritten using TurboVision by Stefan Tanurkov and Dmitry Dotsenko (Dmitry did develop DN in Moscow State University). These versions are sometimes referred as DN II.

In 1993 Slava Filimonov invited Stefan to join RitLabs (former RIT S.R.L) in order to continue producing and publishing DN with joint efforts. Slava also contributed programming new components, design and made countless optimizations and improvements. He wrote new software key protection system which remained unbreakable for almost 4 years after it's introduction. DN as a nice example of DOS cracking.

DN II was actively developed till the beginning of 1995 (until the version 1.35 that should be considered as a milestone in the OFM implementations). Several other programmers participated in the development after the version 1.35. Starting from version 1.37 Slava Filimonov and Ilya Bagdasarov were in charge for bug fixing. Slava and Ilya Bagdasarov solely maintained, developed and released versions 1.37 through 1.39. After they left, DN was maintained again by Stefan and newly acquired developer - Maxim Masiutin.

In 1998 the development mostly took bugfixing direction as RITlabs new product The Bat! became a more promising software product with much better commercial potential.

The latest shareware version was 1.50. Then, in late 1999, RitLabs decided to make version 1.51 of the Dos Navigator completely free with freely available source code.

[edit] Life after Dos Navigator

Andrew Zabolotny currently works for a company in Russia. He also contributed to several open source projects, including Crystal Space.

Stefan Tanurkov and Maxim Masiutin are still employed at RitLabs, developing The Bat!

In 1998 Slava Filimonov wrote another file manager windows for MRP Informatics, a company in Czech Republic. This project is discontinued now.

Other groups still release software based on the DN open source code, including new features such as support for long file names, and support for Linux.

DN 1.51 650KB Win32 OS/2 - Sources (Virtual Pascal) (972,655)

DOS Navigator Open Source Project DN OSP 6.4.0 1MB DOS/DPMI(Win9x)

DN 4.9.0 2004 for DOS included in UBCD v3.4.