DOS Navigator (DN) is an

orthodox file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or pr ...

for DOS, OS/2, and

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 serv ...

Influence

DOS Navigator is an influential early implementation of orthodox file manager (OFM). By implementing three additional types of virtual file systems (VFS):

XTree XTree is a file manager program originally designed for use under DOS. It was published by Underwear Systems, later Executive Systems, Inc. (ESI) and first released on 1 April 1985, and became highly popular. The program uses a character-mode i ...

, Briefcase and list-based, DN launched a new generation of OFMs. It offers unlimited panels and many new important features, making it one of the most powerful (and complex) OFMs.

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

Chișinău Chișinău ( , , ), also known as Kishinev (russian: Кишинёв, r=Kishinjóv ), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the Republic of Moldova. The city is Moldova's main industrial and commercial center, and is located in the ...

Moldova Moldova ( , ; ), officially the Republic of Moldova ( ro, Republica Moldova), is a Landlocked country, landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. The List of states ...

). After that, DN was rewritten using

Turbo Vision Turbo Vision is a character-mode text user interface framework included with Borland Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Borland, Borland C++ circa 1990. It was used by Borland itself to write the integrated development environments (IDE) for these prog ...

by Stefan Tanurkov and Dmitry Dotsenko (Dotsenko developed DN at Moscow State University). These versions are sometimes referred as DN II. In 1993, Slava Filimonov invited Stefan to join him to continue producing and publishing DN with joint efforts. Slava programmed new components, design and made countless optimizations and improvements. He wrote a new software key protection system that remained unbroken for almost four years after its introduction. DN II was actively developed until the start of 1995, until version 1.35. Several other programmers participated in development after version 1.35. Starting from version 1.37, Filimonov and Ilya Bagdasarov were in charge of bug-fixing. Filimonov and Bagdasarov solely maintained, developed and released versions 1.37 through 1.39. After they left, DN was maintained again by Tanurkov and Maxim Masiutin. In 1998, the development mostly took a bug-fixing direction as Ritlabs' product

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became a more promising software product with much better commercial potential. The last shareware version was 1.50. In late 1999, Ritlabs decided to make version 1.51 of the DOS Navigator completely free with freely available source code. Several open source DN branches currently exist including win32/dpmi/os2 version "dn/2" and Linux port attempt "dn2l".

Disadvantages

The original DN contains a large amount of assembler code, complicating ports to other platforms. The cross-platform version, DN OSP, in turn, is tied to the

Virtual Pascal Virtual Pascal is a free 32-bit Pascal compiler, IDE, and debugger for OS/2 and Microsoft Windows, with some limited Linux support. Virtual Pascal was developed by Vitaly Miryanov and later maintained by Allan Mertner. Features The compiler ...

compiler and runtime library, which are no longer supported. No version of DN as of January 2022 supports

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

on platforms other than Windows, although cross-platform implementation of

for Pascal with Unicode support exists. The source code license is compromised.

Source code license

DN source code was published under the 3-clause BSD license. However, the code included an implementation of the

library based on the version from the Turbo Pascal distribution, and the latter was never released under a license that allows creation of derivative works. In addition, DN OSP contains modified parts of the

runtime library, while the license for Virtual Pascal itself prohibits distribution of modified versions, however, it is not clear whether this applies only to the compiler or to the runtime library too.

Legacy

Other groups release software based on the DN open source code, including features such as support for long

filename A filename or file name is a name used to uniquely identify a computer file in a directory structure. Different file systems impose different restrictions on filename lengths. A filename may (depending on the file system) include: * name &ndas ...

s, and support for

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, which ...

. * DN 1.51 650 KB for Win32 & OS/2 - Sources (Virtual Pascal) (972,655) * DOS Navigato
Open Source Project
(ODN)
dn2l
Linux port based on DN OSP source code * DN OSP 6.4.0 1 MB for DOS/DPMI (Windows 9x) * Necromancer's DOS Navigator (NDN) * DN 4.9.0 2004 for DOS included in

Ultimate Boot CD The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is a bootable CD-ROM containing a collection of diagnostic tools including CPU tests, memory tests, virus scanning, and other tools. Computer Hope"UBCD" The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) contains over 100 system diagnostic ...

(UBCD) v3.4

References

External links

*
DN Line - a Breakthrough in VFS
Softpanorama
DOS Navigator Open Source Project

DOS Navigator/2 Open Source Project ver. 2

https://archive.today/yOxE1 --> Necromancer's DOS Navigator
Branch of original DOS Navigator it currently runs on DOS, Windows and Linux
Necromancer's DOS Navigator new versions also 64-bit DOS and Windows
{{file managers Orthodox file managers Free file managers DOS software Software using the BSD license OS/2 software