A closer look at the Breadbox Ensemble. What could the advanced shell for MS-DOS do?
Hello, fans of old hardware. This is Anton Komarov, and today we will study an IT artifact, one of the names of which is Breadbox Ensemble. This is a graphical shell for MS-DOS, which was significantly ahead of its time. For example, the concept of the Start menu appeared in it 2.5 years earlier than in Windows 95. The development company, Berkeley Softworks, was tried to be bought by Microsoft, Apple Notebooks and Sun Microsystems. But the management did not agree, deciding to continue their independent “swimming”. And it was quite successful: the latest version of the shell was released all the way back in 2009.
So brew yourself some tea, get some cookies and let's see why there was a serious struggle between the largest software corporations in the early 90s. And how the Breadbox Ensemble influenced the appearance of operating systems of that time. Happy reading.
Taking the bull by the horns
Today we will leave the time machine in the parking lot and will not pay much attention to the history of the Breadbox Ensemble: this topic is vast and deserves a separate post. Let's take a better look at the installation process of this shell and find out what features it provided out of the box.
The Breadbox Ensemble distribution weighed no less than 10 MB. Now this seems ridiculously small. But previously, to transfer this amount of data, you had to use eight floppy disks or even a CD.
As a test configuration, we will use PCem, on which we will launch emulation of a motherboard with an Intel 486DX-II processor (clock frequency 66 Mhz), RAM of 16 MB, a hard drive of as much as 2 GB, a Sound Blaster 16 sound card and the simplest VGA- video card.
MS-DOS 6.22 was installed on the test machine along with the Microsoft Mouse driver and oakcdrom.sys to support the optical drive emulator. This minimum set is enough for installation and launch.
Installation
In the first step, the installer will ask you to fill out a registration card. This is a commercial product, so one of the fields was the serial number that the user received upon purchase:
Using the F3 key, you can quickly check whether the configuration of your computer has been determined correctly. After filling out the data, the installer will offer several installation options to choose from: full or partial installation, and also the ability to manually select components:
Let's choose the full installation option and click Enter. The system will ask several questions about the installation directory and warn you that it will make changes to system files during the installation process. AUTOEXEC.BAT And CONFIG.SYS. After a couple of minutes of copying files, he will congratulate you on the successful installation, immediately offering to perform basic system setup:
We agree. After a couple of seconds, the system will load a setup wizard that will ask you step by step for some details about your system. For example, you need to confirm automatically determined parameters of the graphics subsystem: screen resolution, color bit depth, image boundaries. The wizard will also inquire about the presence of a manipulator such as a mouse and a printer:
After you patiently answer all the questions, the technician will congratulate you on completing the installation. Everything is ready!
Appearance
The very first launch can surprise a lot. The desktop here looks indecently familiar, one might even say, everyday. There is a bottom panel with a button that opens the main menu, and painfully familiar icons: Computer, Documents And Wastebasket. As if I had just installed Windows 95:
The only unfamiliar element here is World. Double-clicking on it will open a window with all installed programs, essentially duplicating the main menu:
If you feel like you're looking at Windows 95 from a parallel universe, you're not alone. It was in this shell that UI concepts first appeared, which were then “borrowed” by other companies such as Microsoft. It is a known fact that Steven Anthony Ballmer, when communicating with Berkeley Softworks founder Brian P. Dougherty, threatened to “crush” the company if they did not sell the license for the start menu, which is already 2.5 years old existed in Breadbox Ensemble:
The next time you open the Start menu on your computer, you will see an echo of the Breadbox Ensemble. But further – more. Here we can find games, an alternative implementation of which also migrated to Windows. For example, FreeCell Solitaire:
Software
Surprisingly, in addition to simple toys, Breadbox Ensemble is crammed with various useful (and not so useful) programs. Some of them are aimed at using the Internet, namely:
Chat — IRQ client.
Dialup & Configure — dialer for establishing a Dialup connection.
Email — email client.
File Transfer — a simple FTP client.
Instant Messenger — utility for instant messaging.
NewsReader — news feed reader.
WebBox — visual HTML editor for creating Web pages.
WebMagick — browser.
This set of applications made it possible to comfortably use the Internet of that time, using a minimum of PC resources. One of the strengths of Breadbox Ensemble was that it ran quickly even on very weak PCs. At the same time, the shell was perfect for office tasks. The kit included a convenient text editor Writer:
And of course, even the spreadsheet editor Spreadsheet. It is clear that this software could hardly compete with MS Office of that time, but it still solved most of the basic problems quite well:
Multimedia capabilities were limited. Yes, you could listen to a regular music CD and that's basically it. But the shell included an image viewer that supported both JPEG and GIF formats:
It looks terrible in 16 colors, but it’s a fact. I will say more – the authors of Breadbox Ensemble included support for PDF and e-books. The ability to work with these formats depends on the amount of RAM, but it is striking that it is generally possible out of the box. Literally from pure DOS you type the GO command – and that’s it! Five seconds later you have a “fully charged PC”, on which you can jot down text, draw a graph, and even read a book:
Shell or OS
Throughout this article, I refer to Breadbox Ensemble as just a shell for MS-DOS, but this is probably not entirely correct. On the one hand, it will not start without DOS, and it is completely dependent on the drivers loaded into it. But on the other hand, it has a full-fledged SDK, which allows you to write applications for it. True, it itself is written in a wild mixture of assembler, interpreted language IZL and its own implementation of Objective-C with non-standard extensions. So it was a pain for application developers, and the company was very late in releasing the SDK.
All this naturally led to the fact that there were few applications for Breadbox Ensemble, and most developers concentrated on simpler and more convenient development of applications for Windows. We should not forget about the serious pressure from competitors who tried in every possible way to limit the spread, while simultaneously creating their own implementations of successful GUI solutions.
In the market, as in the wild, it is the survival of the fittest. For some time the company stayed afloat, but after a series of failures it sank into oblivion. Well, the source code of this operating system (already under a different name – FreeGEOS) along with the full SDK was posted on GitHub and is available for independent research, modification and assembly.
Conclusion
Time does not stand still, and developments such as Breadbox Ensemble now seem like something frivolous, a “toy” or something. But for its time, these were real innovations in design and a fresh look at what an operating system with a graphical interface should look like. Many of the ideas pioneered by Berkeley Softworks influenced the development of operating systems by both Microsoft and Apple.
Until 2015, there was even an idea to transfer this exotic to Android, but alas. The death of the CEO and owner of Breadbox Ensemble LLC put an end to these plans, literally and figuratively. Now it is of interest only to enthusiasts and researchers.
Have you ever used Breadbox Ensemble? I'm waiting for you in the comments.
