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 p ...

for

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

, and

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Influence

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

virtual file system A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstract layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS ...

s (VFS):

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

, 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 ( , , ; formerly known as Kishinev) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Moldova, largest city of Moldova. The city is Moldova's main industrial and commercial centre, and is located in the middle of the coun ...

Moldova Moldova, officially the Republic of Moldova, is a Landlocked country, landlocked country in Eastern Europe, with an area of and population of 2.42 million. Moldova is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. ...

). After that, DN was rewritten using Turbo Vision by Stefan Tanurkov and Dmitry Dotsenko (Dotsenko developed DN at

Moscow State University Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public university, public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, a ...

). 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 The Bat! became a more promising software product with much better commercial potential. The last

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

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 In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

. Several open source DN branches currently exist including win32/dpmi/os2 version "dn/2" and Linux

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as Hamburg, Manch ...

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

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

and

runtime library A runtime library is a library that provides access to the runtime environment that is available to a computer program tailored to the host platform. A runtime environment implements the execution model as required for a development environme ...

, which are no longer supported. No version of DN as of January 2022 supports

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

on platforms other than Windows, although cross-platform implementation of Turbo Vision 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 BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

. However, the code included an implementation of the Turbo Vision library based on the version from the

Turbo Pascal Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the programming language Pascal (programming language), Pascal running on the operating systems CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS. ...

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

s, and support for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. * DN 1.51 650 KB for

Win32 The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs can acces ...

& 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 Windows 9x is a generic term referring to a line of discontinued Microsoft Windows operating systems released from 1995 to 2000 and supported until 2006, which were based on the kernel introduced in Windows 95 and modified in succeeding version ...

) * Necromancer's DOS Navigator (NDN) * DN 4.9.0 2004 for DOS included in Ultimate Boot CD (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/20180911024812/http://ndn.muxe.com/index.php --> 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 Software using Turbo Vision