A Family Tree - history of Shells

Published on November 15, 2005 By Jafo In WinCustomize News

Article Link

An interesting display in treeform of 'all' the Windows shells [GUI Interfaces], past and present.

Knock your socks off...

http://desktopian.org/shelltree.html

Comments

rmiles7721

on Nov 15, 2005

Tin_Omen's site used to be a daily stop for me. Hasn't updated in forever unfortunately.

Sraf

on Nov 15, 2005

That tree needs preview pics

sryo

on Nov 15, 2005

that tree hasnt been updated in a looong long while, many shells have evolved into something else (litestep: 0.24.7, 0.25, xstep, sidestep; bb4win: bblean, xoblite; sharpe), and others have been created (carbon lokai, metro, ishell (emergedesktop), NeX to name some).

Jafo

on Nov 15, 2005

sryo ....true....but at least it shows the early stuff....and that can be educational to those new to skinning...

Lantec

on Nov 15, 2005

Man...I loved Norton Desktop. Had it from the first release to the end (3.0 I think) I was devestated when 95 wouldn't support it. My all time favorite was a DOS front end called QDOS. Single key, letter driven menu. Today's Drag and Drop couldn't keep up.

Thanks for the link Jafo.

Kevison

on Nov 16, 2005

wow brings back some memories!! Heh sometimes I still use blackbox for windows. Its amazing how much has changed tho. I started on the IBM PC Jr when PCs first came out. Text interfaces unless you had time to write some sort of text based UI. C and assembly language programming.. heheheh it was a bit fun! I forget exactly who, but there was a BBS that had a sort of graphical UI back around the late 80's maybe 1990 or so... ah well.

c242

on Nov 16, 2005

Yeah, Norton Navigator has been the best graphical filemanager there has ever been. Even Total Commander isn't to me what that tool was.

Koasati

on Nov 16, 2005

I don't about many of the apps listed, but NextStart, and HoverDesk aren't shells. I know there were a few people experimenting with running HvD as a shell, but nothing came of it.

Lantec

on Nov 16, 2005

I forget exactly who, but there was a BBS that had a sort of graphical UI back around the late 80's maybe 1990 or so

Compuserve

Phar0e

on Nov 16, 2005

only one shell really counts.....LiteStep

uncontested best

Jafo

on Nov 16, 2005

only one shell really counts.....LiteStep

....ah, Phil, yer biased...

treetog

on Nov 16, 2005

that 'tree' needs a 'tog'

mrbiotech

on Nov 16, 2005

According to that genealogy, 1999 was a pretty happenin' year. Didn't realize so many of what are considered the "mature" shells (LiteStep, Talisman, Aston) had their roots so recently.

revdshepard

on Nov 17, 2005

The links to the GUI galleries at the bottom of the page all lead to microsoft.com??? Does anyone know of good, current links to some of these types of galleries?

Kevison

on Nov 17, 2005

Compuserve

HA! yep that was it... Cant believe how long it has been!!

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