Remember TopView, IBM Corp’s graphical multitasking front end for MS-DOS that the company pushed energetically in 1984 and 1985 to no visible effect in the market? Well according to Computer Reseller News, the company is going to try again, this time with a graphical user interface for MS-DOS that provides the same look and feel as the Workplace Shell in OS/2 2.0, but without imposing a heavy overhead – the company says it wants to keep MS-DOS small and fast. It is also working on an OS/2 2.0 Lite, which may fit on three floppies. The aim is for it to run on 80386 machines with 2Mb memory and to require no more than 15Mb of disk. It will be able to run MS-DOS and Windows applications, but will not have the high-performance file system or the applications that come with OS/2. Both are expected to arrive sometime in 1993.
