ViewMAX

Digital Research already owned GEM when, in 1990, it wanted DR DOS 5.0 to have something MS-DOS 4's text-mode shell lacked: a graphical front end. The result was built on the GEM/3 desktop, with the drawing engine baked into the executable. Users got icons, folders in windows, a trash can and a mouse, and could start DOS programs with a double-click. What they could not do was run GEM applications: AES and VDI existed only for ViewMAX's own use, so as a graphical platform the shell was a dead end from day one.

ViewMAX 2 arrived with DR DOS 6.0 in 1991 and cooperated with TaskMAX, the new task switcher, so you could hop between several loaded DOS programs from the shell, roughly what the MS-DOS Shell Task Swapper did in text mode. DR DOS sold on being a better DOS than Microsoft's; the shell was a garnish few people used daily. By the time Novell DOS 7 shipped in 1994, ViewMAX was gone, and Windows 3.1 was the only graphical environment on the PC that counted. Caldera later released the code along with the rest of GEM.