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Alternative doesn't mean good...

I was browsing my collection of ancient software that I lug around when I came across something that I'd nearly completely forgotten about....

Windes Me.

Windes Millennium Edition.

This was back in the early 2000s, the naughts.  I was starting to get the reputation as 'that guy' when it came to old hardware.  Somewhat deserved because I would haunt the thrift stores in Chicago (of which there were many) in search of cheap computers I could play with and try to learn from.  I would also scour places to find good copies of older software.

This lead to me being gifted an ancient Tandy 286 computer.  It had I think 4mb of ram?  And a hard disk of something like 20mbs?  I had no idea what to do with it but as it was gifted me by a family friend of my Mother's I couldn't just reject it.  It was already there for me to take and of course my parents didn't want it cluttering up their place either...

So there I was with this machine that really wasn't strong enough for any of the stuff I had at the time.  I began to look around to see if I could find something that would work on such an old machine, and to my surprise I came across Maniasoft's Windes Me.

'What luck!' I thought to myself, 'these specs are almost exactly what I have.'


'I think this could really work.'
'And it's only $10!'
'What a bargain!'
The reality was somewhat different than what I had expected.
I had thought it'd be something like the old Breadbox Ensemble. Maybe it'd appear more like the 8-bit version but it'd still be somewhat decent.  I mean look at that screenshot!  I was expecting at minimum something like this:

I didn't think that unreasonable.  I still don't think based on what was happening in the world of DOS graphical shells that it was unreasonable to expect something like that.  I mean look at the other offerings of the time!

There was SEAL and its distros, offering applications and a graphical desktop like this:

Qube was another very promising work in progress at the time:

Heck, this was even about the time that the old GEM from DRI had been open sourced.  And while a bit rough it was still clearly usable:

WinDes Me was...not.  Whereas I had been expecting a basic functional clone like the picture for Windes Me suggested it would be, I instead got this....

I think I can be forgiven thinking that as my first impression I thought they hadn't even tried.  Except the problem is they had.  They'd clearly made some effort here and it still looked like a parody flash version of Windows 95.

Just look at the installer they made, attempting to ape the look and feel of the Windows 9x installer:

 

That's a lot of effort to just half-ass in the end.  So what possessed these people to even try to pull this off?  Why waste the time and effort just for a rip off?  I mean surely they could have just taken people's money and had a broken link they claimed was only temporarily down at the moment and still made out.  They could have faked a bunch of screenshots and gotten more fish.  They didn't.  They actually clearly tried here for some variant of attempt made.

I don't think I'll ever really understand it.

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