| DOS Navigator | |
|---|---|
 Screenshot of DOS Navigator | |
| Original authors | Stefan Tanurkov, Andrew Zabolotny, Sergey Melnik (initial release) |
| Developer | Ritlabs |
| Initial release | 1991; 34 years ago (1991) |
| Stable release | 1.51[1]  / 19 April 1999 |
| Written in | Turbo Pascal,Turbo Vision |
| Operating system | DOS,OS/2,Windows |
| Type | Orthodox file manager |
| License | BSD-3-Clause |
| Website | ritlabs |
DOS Navigator (DN) is anorthodox file manager forDOS,OS/2, andWindows.
DOS Navigator is an influential early implementation of orthodox file manager (OFM). By implementing three additional types ofvirtual file systems (VFS):XTree, Briefcase and list-based, DN launched a new generation of OFMs. It offers unlimited panels and many new important features, making it one of the most powerful (and complex) OFMs.[2]
The initial version of DN I (v 0.90) was released in 1991, and written by Stefan Tanurkov, Andrew Zabolotny and Sergey Melnik (all fromChișinău,Moldova). After that, DN was rewritten usingTurbo Vision by Stefan Tanurkov and Dmitry Dotsenko (Dotsenko developed DN atMoscow State University). These versions are sometimes referred as DN II.
In 1993, Slava Filimonov invited Stefan to join him to continue producing and publishing DN with joint efforts. Slava programmed new components, design and made countless optimizations and improvements. He wrote a newsoftware key protection system that remained unbroken for almost four years after its introduction.[3]
DN II was actively developed until the start of 1995, until version 1.35.[2] Several other programmers participated in development after version 1.35. Starting from version 1.37, Filimonov and Ilya Bagdasarov were in charge of bug-fixing. Filimonov and Bagdasarov solely maintained, developed and released versions 1.37 through 1.39. After they left, DN was maintained again by Tanurkov and Maxim Masiutin.
In 1998, the development mostly took a bug-fixing direction as Ritlabs' productThe Bat! became a more promising software product with much better commercial potential. The lastshareware version was 1.50. In late 1999, Ritlabs decided to make version 1.51 of the DOS Navigator completely free with freely availablesource code.
Several open source DN branches currently exist including win32/dpmi/os2 version "dn/2"[4] and Linuxport attempt "dn2l".[5]
The original DN contains a large amount ofassembler code, complicating ports to other platforms. The cross-platform version, DN OSP, in turn, is tied to theVirtual Pascalcompiler andruntime library, which are no longer supported. No version of DN as of January 2022 supportsUnicode on platforms other than Windows, although cross-platform implementation ofTurbo Vision for Pascal with Unicode support exists.[6] The source code license is compromised.
DN source code was published under the 3-clauseBSD license. However, the code included an implementation of theTurbo Vision library based on the version from theTurbo Pascal distribution, and the latter was never released under a license that allows creation of derivative works. In addition, DN OSP contains modified parts of theVirtual Pascal runtime library, while the license for Virtual Pascal itself prohibits distribution of modified versions, however, it is not clear whether this applies only to the compiler or to the runtime library too.[7]
Other groups release software based on the DN open source code, including features such as support forlong filenames, and support forLinux.