Caldera Inc, the DR-DOS company founded by Novell Inc founder Ray Noorda, has released a fully re-written 32-bit version of its DR WebSpyder browser for DOS, with which it believes it can tap the coming explosion in networked embedded consumer devices. Caldera says the combination of DR-DOS and WebSpyder offers the most compact graphical internet access client available. The company released version 1.0 of the WebSpyder browser last year (CI No 3,181), having licensed the technology from Czech firm, xChaos Software, whose Arachne 1.0, browser formed the basis of Caldera’s initial offering. Roger Gross, general manager of the company’s DR-DOS division, says Caldera is targeting firmly at the 80386 chip market, which he believes will take the embedded device market by storm in the next few years. Advanced Micro Devices Inc, AMD, reckons it is tooling up to build hundreds of thousands of the chips over the next few years, because the low unit price and the performance make them ideal for low cost consumer devices such as set-top boxes, hand-held devices, games machines and mobile phones, as well as internet kiosks. While Intel Corp has been looking to get into the embedded space with the StrongARM technology it picked up from Digital Equipment Corp (CI No 3,160), Gross reckons the chip giant has been putting so much time and energy into its Pentium processors, it has taken its eye of the 80386 ball. Gross believes the use of DOS and the 80386, combined, of course with the company’s web browser – which runs both on DR-DOS and MS-DOS, is one of the lowest risk options available to a manufacturer, given that DOS has been around for so long, is robust, tried and tested, and has a vast amount of tools, device drivers, and developers conversant with the technology. WebSpyder runs on as little as a 40MHZ 386 with 4Mb RAM. Gross believes the trend will be for dedicated, application specific devices, and that alternative solutions such as a device running Windows NT just so it can run Internet Explorer, will be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The latest version of DR-DOS, 7.02, offers a new energy-saving feature, dynamic idle detection, which can sense idle time even between key strokes, and slow down the CPU or reduce memory consumption, thus saving valuable battery life. Caldera currently claims to have sold some 3 million copies of DR-DOS, and says it is focusing on the embedded market for internet connectivity to small devices. Gross says the company is not interested in the Real-Time Operating System space, as it believes there are plenty of other opportunities for DR-DOS. WebSpyder 2.0 is available now, from $50 for a single copy.
