A Family Tree - history of Shells

Tuesday, November 15, 2005 by Jafo | Discussion: WinCustomize News

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

Knock your socks off...

http://desktopian.org/shelltree.html

15 Reply 14 Referrals
rmiles7721
Reply #1 Tuesday, November 15, 2005 8:26 PM
Tin_Omen's site used to be a daily stop for me. Hasn't updated in forever unfortunately.

Sraf
Reply #2 Tuesday, November 15, 2005 9:04 PM
That tree needs preview pics

sryo
Reply #3 Tuesday, November 15, 2005 9:22 PM
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
Reply #4 Tuesday, November 15, 2005 9:58 PM
sryo ....true....but at least it shows the early stuff....and that can be educational to those new to skinning...

Lantec
Reply #5 Tuesday, November 15, 2005 10:03 PM
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
Reply #6 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 7:34 AM
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
Reply #7 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 12:31 PM
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
Reply #8 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 1:19 PM
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
Reply #9 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 1:34 PM
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
Reply #10 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 4:14 PM
only one shell really counts.....LiteStep

uncontested best

Jafo
Reply #11 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 5:53 PM
only one shell really counts.....LiteStep
  ....ah, Phil, yer biased...

treetog
Reply #12 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 8:25 PM

that 'tree' needs a 'tog'


mrbiotech
Reply #13 Wednesday, November 16, 2005 10:23 PM
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
Reply #14 Thursday, November 17, 2005 9:30 AM
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
Reply #15 Thursday, November 17, 2005 2:14 PM
Compuserve




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

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