Purpose of the application
DosLynx is a distributed hypertext browser with World Wide Web capabilities supporting DOS users.
Distribution category
DosLynx is copyrighted by the University of Kansas and is free for instructional and research educational use. Non-educational use will be licensed at a later date.
Availability
DosLynx is available in its source and binary forms by binary anonymous FTP from ftp://ftp2.cc.ukans.edu/pub/WWW/DosLynx/ The self-extracting archive file name is DLX0_8A.EXE; the source file name is SRC0_8A.ZIP.
Description of application
DosLynx is a straightforward menu driven application. It supports the following URL types: file, ftp, gopher, http, news, wais.
DosLynx is a MDI (multiple document interface) application, so each window represents an open file at any given time. The application can download an inline image and display inline GIFs; it has a mail developer and will suggest a file name when prompting the user to save a file.
A feature of DosLynx is its blind support. The /B command line option was implemented to aid blind users using DosLynx with a screen reader.
Developmental problems
640K barrier: Documents are, therefore, written to disk to save memory and then read from disk in chunks to display on the screen. On the one hand, the application is adversely affected but, on the other, it pays off in that large documents can be displayed - sometimes!
CERN libwww 2.14: This code was hard to port to DOS because the code is not well written (it still has many remaining memory leaks) and, in many cases, there were no correlating system functions from unix to dos.
TCP/IP driver: Integrating the WATTCP as the tcp/ip package was not so hard, but that left only DOS packet driver enabled machines as the market.
Combining sources: The three code sources combined (libwww, wattcp and doslynx) run dangerously close to the 64K limit in DGROUP.
Time: Once the original author (Garrett Arch Blythe) was put in control of both Lynx and DosLynx about May 1994, there was little time for dedicated DosLynx development. There was a hiatus in the application's development between August 1994 and early 1995 when Ravi Kolli is reported to have taken over the project at the
Kansas University <doslynx@falcon.cc.ukans.edu>Reason for choosing Turbo Vision
DosLynx was developed, ground up, from late November 1993 to mid May 1994 on a 386sx16 4M Ram 40M hard drive; around a 40 minute compile time.
Unknown to the rest of the world, Lynx had been ported to DOS one year earlier by the author. This was the pre-WWW capable version of Lynx.
When the second chance came around, he decided to use TV because it was first and foremost readily available and familiar. It cleanly cut DosLynx and Lynx into two seperate entities. Having taken a long time deciding what to call this DOS www browser, it became, in the end, simply DosLynx because Lynx was already associated with the Kansas University though the two browsers had nothing in common.
Also, TV would help with the implementation of the forms interface. This was never done, in part, due to the lack of support in the libwww for forms.
Contact
Garrett Arch Blythe
http://home.mcom.com/people/blythe
blythe@netscape.com
Netscape Communications Corporation +1+(415)528-2639