Well,
I do collect GUI`s and so far none of them made it to a standard on A8... In my collection are the following GUI`s / desktops:
- GOS 1985/86 (2 or 3 versions, looks nice, but thats it!)
- GOE 1988 (also 2 versions, supports mouse and Sparta DOS)
- XL-TOS 1987 (2 versions from german Atari magazine; absolutely lame - looks good, loads nothing, crashes always!),
- SAM 1988-89 (commercial version 2.x and type-in version 1.x from german Atari magazine; has lots of utilities, based on GEM of Atari ST; works with mouse and Joystick, can be enhanced with new tools easily - alas it merely works with DOS 2.5 ED format which was very popular at that time)
- ATOS 200? (complete GUI by TOM Hunt, with lots of tools and Sparta (only) support, alas the current version requires a harddisk partition 4MB or bigger or a good knowledge which parts are basically required to run the GUI from various disks and/or ramdisk),
- Desktop Construction Set (also by Tom Hunt, a sort of fore-runner to ATOS, available in 3 separate versions: a) DOS 2.5, b) MyDOS, c) SpartaDOS; since I never used it, I cannot tell much about it...)
- BOSS-XE and BOSS-X 1994-2004 (complete GUI written by Mirko Sobe in Turbo Basic XL; comes with lots of tools and many great ideas; supports MyDOS, subdirs and HD partitions up to 16MB; alas, is written completely in TB which takes quite some time to load: DOS-TB XL-GUI-program/tool),
- Diamond GOS 1988-1992 (available as a demo-version on disk and as version 1.x, 2.x and 3.x on super-cart. by Alan Reeve; the demo version is PD, the cart versions or better their ROMs are now freeware; this should have been the standard for Atari XL/XE computers, alas the Tramiels rejected the request by Reevesoft to licence this product and make it an official Atari product; in the end the GUI never really caught on; version 2.x and 3.x supported DOS XE, Sparta DOS, MyDOS and other systems with the capability of subdirs...)
well, there are dozens of other A8 GUI`s - think I even have some polish GUI`s in my collection, but as said before: none of them ever made it to a standard on the A8 and nowadays I have my doubts that any kind of GUI will ever do so. But hey, if you have nothing else to do, why not code another GUI... ;-) -Andreas.
P.S.: If you are interested in any GUI just write an e-mail to: amp#abbuc*de and I will send you a part of my or my complete GUI collection...