DR-WebSpyder is a DOS

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 on ...

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 func ...

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 ...

that was developed by Caldera UK in 1997. It was based on the

DR-DOS 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-DO ...

operating system and networking components from

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

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 als ...

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

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 ...

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 si ...

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, which i ...

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

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 NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product i ...

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 co ...

(SaaS) that did not require

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

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 ...

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 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 Mobile 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 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 describ ...

(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 ...

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 ...

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 driver PC/TCP Packet Driver is a networking API for MS-DOS, PC DOS, and later x86 DOS implementations such as DR-DOS, FreeDOS, etc. It implements the lowest levels of a TCP/IP stack, where the remainder is typically implemented either by terminate-and-stay ...

s with Novell's dialer,

ODI ODI may refer to: * Object Design, Incorporated, a defunct database software company * One Day International, cricket match * Open Data Institute, a UK not-for-profit company promoting open data * Open Data-Link Interface, an implementation of th ...

driver suite (from

Personal NetWare 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, ...

etc.) and TCP/IP stack, 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 GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

s, an optional on-screen keyboard 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 Chrome may refer to: Materials * Chrome plating, a process of surfacing with chromium * Chrome alum, a chemical used in mordanting and photographic film Computing * Google Chrome, a web browser developed by Google ** ChromeOS, a Google Chrome- ...

), implemented support for

NetScape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

-compatible

frames A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent. Frame and FRAME may also refer to: Physical objects In building construction *Framing (co ...

, 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 com ...

(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 In computing, protected mode, also called protected virtual address mode, is an operational mode of x86-compatible central processing units (CPUs). It allows system software to use features such as virtual memory, paging and safe multi-taskin ...

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 porting, port of t ...

, 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 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 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. This was in fact the DR-WebSpyder OS configured as loosely coupled components in which a special version of the DR-DOS ANSI.SYS 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 via CONFIG.SYS SHELL replacing the default COMMAND.COM 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 113 ...

PCs with a minimum of 4 MB of RAM, the floppy would boot the DR-DOS 7.02 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 A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...

in order not to interfere with other systems installed on the machine and to demonstrate its potential usage in

diskless workstation A diskless node (or diskless workstation) is a workstation or personal computer without disk drives, which employs network booting to load its operating system from a server. (A computer may also be said to ''act as a diskless node'', if its dis ...

s. 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 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 ...

(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 Satellite Internet access is Internet access provided through communication satellites. Modern consumer grade satellite Internet service is typically provided to individual users through geostationary satellites that can offer relatively high d ...

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 Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, 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 sec ...

(SSL) protocol,

cookie A cookie is a baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, ...

s, 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 A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly but in ...

displays as well as anti-aliased

font In movable type, metal typesetting, a font is a particular #Characteristics, size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "Sort (typesetting), sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of ...

s 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 mo ...

and JVM support to the browser, but this component never left prototype status. Two desired prerequisites for Java integration were to add 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 DOS. Long filenames can be more descriptive, including longer filename extensions such as .jpeg, .tiff, .html, ...

s (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, ...

to DOS. Caldera's DPMS-enabled dynamically loadable LONGNAME driver provided VFAT-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), whi ...

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 hexadecim ...

) not only to support a lot more

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some c ...

s 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 ...

-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 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 ...

Embrowser and Embedix Browser

On 20 July 1999, Caldera Thin Clients renamed itself into Lineo under the new lead of Bryan Wayne Sparks. DR-WebSpyder was renamed Embrowser and the browser was said to be ported to

. A version of DR-WebSpyder for

IMS Ims is a Norwegian surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Gry Tofte Ims (born 1986), Norwegian footballer * Rolf Anker Ims (born 1958), Norwegian ecologist See also * IMS (disambiguation) Ims is a Norwegian surname. Notable people wit ...

REAL/32, 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, 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. 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' origin ...

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, Motorola ...

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

Features

Notes

References

External links

(archived web site caldera.com fro
1996-10-18
t
1999-04-30
*

Caldera UK Ltd. 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 ...

(archived web site caldera.co.uk fro
1997-12-21
t
1999-10-12
*

Caldera Thin Clients, Inc. 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 ...

(archived web site calderathin.com fro
1999-01-17
t

and

Lineo, Inc. 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 ...

(archived web site calderathin.com fro
1999-10-12
t

lineo.com fro
2000-05-10
t
2003-03-20
and embedix.com fro
2002-06-03
t
2003-02-20
{{Email clients Web browsers for DOS DOS software 1997 software Discontinued internet suites Discontinued web browsers Caldera DR-WebSpyder