Ray Van Eng (06/12/97)                        

Believe it or not, the Microsoft Disk Operating System (DOS) is still very much alive in cyberspace these days. Bowser software built for this character mode operating system listed at the FDISK.COM Internet DOS Page numbered more than half a dozen.

The more familiar ones such as Lynx, Bobcat etc. are text based programs while some others are capable of displaying not only graphics and images, but also framed pages (one at a time) with support for Java planned for the future.

A recent entrant such as the the Arachne introduced earlier this year requires only 640 KB of RAM and 2 MB of hard disk space. Compared that to the latest versions of the Navigator or the Internet Explorer which need at least 8 MB of RAM to run and may take up 20MB of disk space for storage, and you can immediately see why the compact DOS programs have become favorites among Net surfers with more modest machines.

The Arachne was written by Michael Polak, a Czech programmer with a distaste for bloated Windows applications. He has made his software available for download as a shareware at his web page operated by the Prague based Network and Fiction.

Browsers like Arachne will not only extend the useful lives of those 286, 386 or even some XT computers, it may also prove to be vital in running small memory footprint "thin client" computing products.

Caldera Inc., a Provo, UT start up company by former Novell CEO Ray Noorda is getting ready to introduce a customized version of the Arachne software to run on a new generation of network computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), handheld data terminals and other Internet appliance units.