DR-WebSpyder is a

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

mail client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

and operating system

runtime environment In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile t ...

that was developed by

Caldera UK DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-D ...

in 1997. It was based on the DR-DOS operating system and networking components from Novell as well as the

Arachne Arachne (; from , cognate with Latin ) is the protagonist of a tale in Greek mythology known primarily from the version told by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE), which is the earliest extant source for the story. In Book Six of his ...

web browser by Michal Polák of xChaos software. The system was designed to run on low-end

desktop system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...

s, but being able to boot and execute from disk as well as from

ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

, it was also tailored for x86-based

thin client In computer networking, a thin client is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as ''network computers'', or in th ...

s and

embedded systems An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' ...

with or without disk drives. Using the web browser as its principal user interface, it could be also used for kiosk systems and

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

es. Named Embrowser, it has been ported to

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

in 1999 and was called Embedix Browser since 2000.

NIOS and IOS

DR-WebSpyder was originally conceived as project NIOS (Novell Internet Operating System) at Novell's European Development Centre (EDC), UK in 1994 by then DR-DOS engineer Roger Alan Gross, who was working on Novell's Embedded Systems Technology (NEST) initiative to create embedded system applications that connect intelligent devices to NetWare networks. NIOS was conceived as a thin client operating system that provided Novell with a graphical client operating system to run web applications hosted on NetWare, creating a Novell-centric platform for

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

(SaaS) that did not require

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

operating system. NIOS comprised 32-bit versions of Novell's existing 16-bit DOS technologies including the DR-DOS operating system, Novell's

modem dialer A dialer (American English) or dialler (British English) is an electronic device that is connected to a telephone line to monitor the dialed numbers and alter them to seamlessly provide services that otherwise require lengthy National or Internati ...

and

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

stack from

LAN Workplace for DOS NetWare Lite and Personal NetWare are a series of discontinued peer-to-peer local area networks developed by Novell for DOS- and Windows-based personal computers aimed at personal users and small businesses in the 1990s. NetWare Lite In 1991, N ...

NetWare Mobile NetWare Lite and Personal NetWare are a series of discontinued peer-to-peer local area networks developed by Novell for DOS- and Windows-based personal computers aimed at personal users and small businesses in the 1990s. NetWare Lite In 1991, N ...

plus licensed third-party components such as the

Kaffe Kaffe is a discontinued "clean room design" ( reverse engineering) version of a Java Virtual Machine. It comes with a subset of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), Java API, and tools needed to provide a Java runtime environment. Like ...

Java virtual machine (JVM), Allegro for graphics, and

Mosaic A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

for the web browser.

WebSpyder, WebSpyder 32 and DR-WebSpyder

Gross's plans were interrupted when

Caldera, Inc. Caldera was a US-based software company founded in 1994 to develop Linux- and DOS-based operating system products. Caldera Caldera, Inc. was a Canopy-funded software company founded in October 1994 and incorporated on 25 January 1995 by f ...

acquired the remaining

Digital Research Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS and Gr ...

assets including DR-DOS from Novell on 23 July 1996, but without the personnel. Gross telephoned Caldera's Ransom H. Love the same day offering to set up a new DR-DOS team outside of Novell. Gross subsequently joined Caldera as general manager of the Digital Research Systems Group (DSG) in December that year and set about rehiring the DRDOS/NIOS team in the UK to develop the new operating system and web browser. Under Caldera, NIOS was renamed IOS (Internet Operating System). The plan to use Mosaic was also dropped and instead Caldera licensed the source code of the 16-bit DOS web browser

. The team replaced Arachne's dialer and packet drivers with Novell's dialer, ODI driver suite (from Personal NetWare etc.) and

TCP/IP stack The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

, added support for

animated Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...

and scaled GIFs, an optional

on-screen keyboard A virtual keyboard is a software component that allows the input of characters without the need for physical keys. The interaction with the virtual keyboard happens mostly via a touchscreen interface, but can also take place in a different form ...

for mouse and touch panel usage (SoftKeyboards) for possible keyboardless operation, and an install program. Also, they completely changed the design of the browser (customizable chrome), implemented support for NetScape-compatible frames, and used Allegro for graphics. The browser also supported "execute links" to run and interact with DOS programs and batchjobs run on the web client, a feature originally introduced as

DOS Gateway Interface Arachne is a stable Internet suite containing a graphical web browser, email client, and dialer. Originally, Arachne was developed by Michal Polák under his xChaos label, a name he later changed into Arachne Labs. It was written in C and compi ...

(DGI) in Arachne. IOS became formally known as WebSpyder in May 1997. Some months later, it was ported to compile as a 32-bit protected mode extended DOS application (utilizing DPMI using

DJGPP DJ's GNU Programming Platform (DJGPP) is a software development suite for Intel 80386-level and above, IBM PC compatibles which supports DOS operating systems. It is guided by DJ Delorie, who began the project in 1989. It is a port of the GNU Co ...

, a GNU compiler for DOS), then referred to as WebSpyder 32, but renamed DR-WebSpyder in early 1998. On 11 May 1998, Caldera started shipping DR-WebSpyder 2.0 as both a

HTML 3.2 The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript ...

web browser application and browser OS. On 1 June 1998, the company opened a sales and support office in Taiwan to be close to potential

OEM An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...

customers. A maintenance release DR-WebSpyder 2.0a was issued on 19 August 1998. Caldera distributed a free demo version of DR-WebSpyder 2.0a on a bootable fully self-contained 3.5-inch

floppy A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined wi ...

. This was in fact the DR-WebSpyder OS configured as loosely coupled components in which a special version of the DR-DOS

ANSI.SYS ANSI.SYS is a device driver in the DOS family of operating systems that provides extra console functions through ANSI escape sequences. It is partially based upon a subset of the text terminal control standard proposed by the ANSI X3L2 Technical C ...

driver would mute the stream of text messages at startup of the DOS system while a graphical company logo was displayed until the web browser was launched as a

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard o ...

via CONFIG.SYS SHELL replacing the default

COMMAND.COM COMMAND.COM is the default command-line interpreter for MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. In the case of DOS, it is the default user interface as well. It has an additional role as the usual first program run after boot (init proc ...

command line interpreter. On

386 __NOTOC__ Year 386 ( CCCLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Honorius and Euodius (or, less frequently, year 11 ...

PCs with a minimum of 4 MB of RAM, the floppy would boot the

DR-DOS 7.02 DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-D ...

based browser operating system complete with memory manager,

RAM disk Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, dial-up modem, LAN, mouse and display drivers and automatically launch into the graphical browser, without ever touching the machine's hard disk in order not to interfere with other systems installed on the machine and to demonstrate its potential usage in diskless workstations. Users could start browsing the web or accessing mails immediately after entering their access credentials. A further refined international revision of the demo by Matthias R. Paul utilized more sophisticated multi-level compression to free enough space on the floppy image to also include menu options and additional drivers to choose between several languages and keyboard layouts and give room for further expansion or customization of the operation system and browser through OEMs or users. On 2 September 1998, it was announced that the Digital Research Systems Group and consequently also Caldera UK was spun out as a separate company Caldera Thin Clients (CTC), incorporated earlier in August 1998. In September 1998, DR-WebSpyder 2.0 achieved commercial success when it was selected for use in an internet

as part of a satellite internet access solution. On 3 November 1998, the company announced DR-WebSpyder 2.1. With DR-WebSpyder 2.1 Beta 2 being available since 7 November 1998, the browser was released on 30 November 1998. It added support for

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

, the

Secure Sockets Layer Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...

(SSL) protocol, cookies, sound files, printing on a multitude of printers as well as user profiles and support for multiple mail accounts. It also added scrollable quarter-screen VGA support for low-resolution LCD displays as well as anti-aliased fonts for display on TVs in an optional TV interface mode. Caldera UK also investigated possibilities to add

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

and

JVM A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describes ...

support to the browser, but this component never left prototype status. Two desired prerequisites for Java integration were to add support for long filenames (LFNs) and

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

to DOS. Caldera's DPMS-enabled dynamically loadable

LONGNAME Long filename (LFN) support is Microsoft's backward-compatible extension of the 8.3 filename (short filename) naming scheme used in DOS. Long filenames can be more descriptive, including longer filename extensions such as .jpeg, .tiff, .html, a ...

driver provided

VFAT File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by ...

-compatible LFNs in the FAT file system utilizing

UCS-2 The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, ''Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)'' (plus amendments to that standard), w ...

internally. Matthias R. Paul conducted research how to achieve this with minimal changes to the existing system and to not cause bloat to an operating system also tailored for thin clients and embedded systems. Expanded DRFONT-style .CPI files could have been provided to retrieve bitmaps for the required larger character repertoire (

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecima ...

) not only to support a lot more code pages in general, but also wider

character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

s similar to what was used in

DOS/V DOS/V is a Japanese computing initiative starting in 1990 to allow DOS on IBM PC compatibles with VGA cards to handle double-byte (DBCS) Japanese text via software alone. It was initially developed from PC DOS by IBM for its PS/55 machines (a ...

-compatible systems. In conjunction with a new COUNTRY.SYS file, Paul's enhanced NLSFUNC 4.xx driver, which was introduced with DR-DOS 7.02, could have provided the framework to integrate optional

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

support into the system in a way similar to

DBCS A double-byte character set (DBCS) is a character encoding in which either all characters (including control characters) are encoded in two bytes, or merely every graphic character not representable by an accompanying single-byte character set ...

support. When Gross resigned in January 1999, Caldera Thin Clients, Inc. closed the Caldera UK Ltd. development office in February 1999 soon after the release of DR-DOS 7.03.

Embrowser and Embedix Browser

On 20 July 1999, Caldera Thin Clients renamed itself into

Lineo Lineo was a thin client and embedded systems company spun out of Caldera Thin Clients by 20 July 1999. History Caldera Thin Clients, Inc., had been created as a subsidiary of Caldera, Inc., on 2 September 1998. Caldera Thin Clients' origina ...

under the new lead of

Bryan Wayne Sparks Caldera was a US-based software company founded in 1994 to develop Linux- and DOS-based operating system products. Caldera Caldera, Inc. was a Canopy-funded software company founded in October 1994 and incorporated on 25 January 1995 by f ...

. DR-WebSpyder was renamed Embrowser and the browser was said to be ported to

. A version of DR-WebSpyder for IMS

REAL/32 Multiuser DOS is a real-time multi-user multi-tasking operating system for IBM PC-compatible microcomputers. An evolution of the older Concurrent CP/M-86, Concurrent DOS and Concurrent DOS 386 operating systems, it was originally developed by ...

, a successor to Digital Research's and Novell's

Multiuser DOS Multiuser DOS is a real-time multi-user multi-tasking operating system for IBM PC-compatible microcomputers. An evolution of the older Concurrent CP/M-86, Concurrent DOS and Concurrent DOS 386 operating systems, it was originally developed by ...

, has been worked on in 1999 as well. Since October 1999, a DOS version of DR-WebSpyder 2.5 aka Embrowser 2.5 was available on Lineo's site. Since Lineo's own thin-client Linux distribution was named

Embedix Lineo was a thin client and embedded systems company spun out of Caldera Thin Clients by 20 July 1999. History Caldera Thin Clients, Inc., had been created as a subsidiary of Caldera, Inc., on 2 September 1998. Caldera Thin Clients' original ...

, the Linux port of the micro web browser was consequently named Embedix Browser by April 2000. In April 2002, some Lineo assets were auctioned off and the company reformed as Embedix, Inc. by July 2002 under the lead of Matthew R. Harris.

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

Metrowerks Metrowerks was a company that developed software development tools for various desktop, handheld, embedded, and gaming platforms. Its flagship product, CodeWarrior, comprised an IDE, compilers, linkers, debuggers, libraries, and related tools. I ...

bought Embedix key assets, possibly including the browser, on 17 December 2002.

NIOS and IOS

WebSpyder, WebSpyder 32 and DR-WebSpyder

Embrowser and Embedix Browser

Features

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links