Some History on Arachne WWW browser for DOS

CORE.EXE version number:

Copyright (c)1996-2000 Michael Polák, Arachne LabsTM All rights reserved

Arachne WWW browser was written and distribution package was created by Arachne Labs (formerly known as xChaos software), using free third-party components (see file license.txt for details on licensing). --- this next part is now obsolete --
As indicated in license.txt, Arachne is now GPL
[register.htm retained for purpose of nostalgia] ;-)
The browser itself is proprietary software and you have to license it if you want to use it for other than non-commercial or evaluation purposes.

Some links in this document work only if you are connected to Internet. Most important online link for you is Arachne Labs online homepage, where you can get the latest version of Arachne. To get general up-to date information, send blank e-mail to info@arachne.cz. If you have question concerning licensing, please contact sales@arachne.cz.

  • Arachne Labs (CZ)
  • IBASE group (CZ)
  • Erick Engelke (Canada)
    WATTCP - free TCP/IP library sources
    Copyright (c) 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 Erick Engelke
    [Used with permission]

    Portions Copyright (c) 1993 Quentin Smart
    Portions Copyright (c) 1991 University of Waterloo
    Portions Copyright (c) 1990 National Center for Supercomputer Applications
    Portions Copyright (c) 1990 Clarkson University
    Portions Copyright (c) 1983, 1986, Imagen Corporation

  • Antonio Lopez (Spain)
    PPPD.EXE - port of Linux PPPD to DOS, see details.
    [Used with permission]
  • Steven Lawson (USA)
    WATTCP maintance. Helped to integrate the latest release of WATTCP library to Arachne.
  • Emmanuel Marty, Suntech (France)
    Provided technical support and know-how required to make Arachne portable and directly helped to port it to Arachne to Linux/SVGAlib/GGI enviroment. See Suntech homepage.
  • Crynwr Software (USA)
    DOS packet driver technology, collection of free packet drivers and support utilities, see their homepage.
  • Robert K Jung (USA)
    UNARJ utility used by Arachne Package Manager. To conform UNARJ license, original source code is included in Source Code package of Arachne WWW browser.
  • New Wave Microtechnology (CZ)
    Portions of WWWMAN.EXE - utility for surfing local drives. Portions of INSIGHT.EXE - utility for converting e-mail messages to HTML. Both utilites were developed directly for xChaos software. e-Mail: shaddack@arachne.cz
  • Krysztof Zietara (Poland)
    Author of excellent ISO-Latin-1 and ISO-Latin-2 version of fonts used by Arachne.
  • Vasily Zatsepin (Russia)
    Author of Cyrillic support for Arachne (CP-1251 and KOI-8R).
  • Bernhard "Bernie" Eriksson (Sweden)
    Improvements on some of the open-sourced Arachne utilities.
  • Multimediaware (Germany) AVI, MOV, MPEG and MP3 playes for DOS, available as shareware plug-ins for Arachne, see their homepage.
  • Or Botton (Israel)
    Hebrew support for Arachne
  • Clarence Verge (Canada)
    Created complete list of ARACHNE.CFG keywords
  • Glenn McCorkle (US)
    Modifications to WWWman, Insight and Core.exe (the main executable of Arachne)
  • Independent JPEG group (USA)
    DJPEG.EXE - public domain convertor of JPEG images to BMP or GIF format, see details.
  • Myiasaka Masaru (JP)
    PNG2BMP.EXE - public domain convertor of PNG images to BMP format, based on libpng and zlib
  • Bill Neisius (USA)
    PLANY.EXE - public domain sound player, see details.
  • Dev Anand Teelucksingh (Trinidad)
    Simple idea how to use COMTOOL.COM to autodetect modem
  • K.H. Weiss
    COMTOOL.COM - public modem tool, see details.
  • Clarkson University, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (USA)
    TELNET.EXE (CUTE) and FTP.EXE - public domain telnet and ftp programs.
Credits:

  • All registered users of Arachne.
  • All members of Arachne mailing list - without their bug reports, Arachne will be just another NCSA Mosaic or Arena.
  • Linus Thorvalds - author of my favourite operating system.
  • Authors of Fast Tracker II - program with the best graphical user interface in DOS. I would never even think about writing Arachne without experiencing Fast Tracker II.
  • Authors of GIMP - the "GNU Photoshop"
  • Caldera, Big Electronics, Patrick Sim, H.W.Wilson, TeleMED , GE Capital Bank - for licensing Arachne
  • NAF - for 2 years of internet connectivity, online disk space and sales management
  • Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of World Wide Web.
  • Hynek Med - for numerous comments about Arachne (in)compatibility with RFC documents, for administration of our server (without knowing root password ;-).
  • Countless registered and unregistered fans of Arachne, who keep on flooding me with tons of enthusiastic e-mails ;-) Let's hope we will manage to survive in competition with those two huge dinousaurs, MSIE and Mozilla
Notes:

LZW algorithm used to decompress GIF files is implemented in IBASE group graphics library X_LOPIF since 1992.

Arachne was written in C language and compiled using Borland C++ 3.1 compiler. Development started in 1996. At that time, I was usning my old noname computer, which doesn't exceed minimal configuration: 386DX/40, 8 MB, 600 MB HDD, Trident 512 kB SVGA, 14" color monitor, 14400 noname faxmodem, MS-DOS 6.22, Desqview. Windows 95 with Netscape were painfuly slow on this hardware, so I deleted them and started to write my own browser.

Development of Arachne now continues on my new noname AMD K5/133, 32 MB, 2.5 GB HDD, S3 Virge 2 MB and OpenDOS 7.02, but we are still testing Arachne on slow PCs with 386 CPU and on HP 1000 CX, PC-XT compatible palmtop with 1 MB of RAM.

In Greek language, Arachne means spider. According to ancient Greek legend, Arachne was a name of woman, who dared to compete with godess Athena. Arachne won, but Athena punished her - Athena turned Arachne into a spider.