Volkov Commander is an orthodox file manager for DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

, in the close tradition of Norton Commander

Norton Commander

Norton Commander was a prototypical orthodox file manager , written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing . NC is a file manager which provides a text user interface on top of DOS. It was officially produced by Symantec between 1986 and 1998...

. The Volkov Commander was completely written in assembly language

Assembly language

An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...

, and is thus very small (less than 100KB) and fast.

Volkov Commander was written by Vsevolod V. Volkov, a programmer from Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

, born in 1971. The stable version of the program is released as shareware

Shareware

The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

. A preview version is also available, which is interchangeably mentioned as an Alpha or Beta release at the website. (The Webmaster for the public face of VC was Daniel R. Egner of Germany.)

The first version was released in 1992.

4.05 (2000) is the last complete official stable version.

4.99.08 alpha/beta (2000) is the last official public version.

Version 4

Version 4.05 is the last fully functional release of the Volkov Commander. It is a pure DOS application, so it doesn't support special features of Windows 9x, like long filenames. (Apart from that, it can be used under Windows 9x) Besides the Russian version there is an English one. Version 4 is shareware and can be tested free for 30 days.

Version 4.99

Vsevolod Volkov was working on the new version 5 of his commander (VC 5). It was still in a phase of development. This upgrade works in a Windows 9x / Windows NT or OS/2-environment. VC 5 supports long filenames, and can explore archives (*.zip, *.arc, *.rar,...) as though they were directories. When updated last time, actual beta release was version 4.99.08 alpha. Most of the features of the final release are already available. Though it is a pure DOS application, the new commander supports some of the special features of Windows 95/98/NT. "Beta version (4.99.xx), of course, can be tested for free, because in this stadium of development it does not yet represent a complete program."

Rumored later version

Rumours about existing Version 5 of Volkov Commander:

In the community someone posted about existing VC 5. Here is what Vsevolod answered:

[...] VC 5.0 is a fake. The last released version is 4.99.08 alpha. [...] I really didn't release new version for very long time. So, development of VC is hold in fact. But I don't exclude possibility of new releases. I have no roadmap and could not promise something."

VC 4.99.08 is included within UBCD v3.4, as part of the general FreeDOS

FreeDOS

FreeDOS is an operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. FreeDOS is made up of many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project...

base package.

External links

• VC line of OFM - a masterpiece of assembler programming – from Softpanorama ebook "The Orthodox File Manager (OFM) Paradigm"