# Polit (operating system)

Polit (also Polit OS, Ukrainian: ОС Політ, lit. 'Flight OS') — is a free and open-source multitasking windowing GUI shell for DOS with a Ukrainian interface. Source code of the program written in Pascal licensed under terms of GNU GPL.

## History

On 29 May 1999, the first SLOCs of the Polit OS shell has been written by Ivan Kozak (Ukrainian: Іван Козак), a Ukrainian programmer, at the time he being a student of KPI, later a student of KNU in the field of Cybernetics.
On 6 January 2001, a new developer, nicknamed 'Cyberhead', joined the Polit development.
During Sumer 2001, source has been fully rewritten from Turbo Pascal 5.5 to Borland Pascal 7.
On 15 January 2002, author of Polit has been hosted to talk about Polit OS at the «Night zone online» (Ukrainian: Зона ночі online) late night TV-show on the Novy Kanal.
On 4 July 2002, CaesarAgency, one of Ukrainian domains registrators, gifted Polit with a free hosting and polit-os.org.ua domain. Polit named as "the first Ukrainian operating system" because it has Ukrainian interface mimiced to Microsoft Windows UI.
On 21 August 2002, Yury Benesh, author of the StormDOS shell in Assembly, ported Polit to Virtual Pascal, which resulted in a small improvements of execution speed and decreasing size of distribution files. Source code and both 16-bit and 32-bit binary builds of this port available on the official Polit OS website.
On 30 August 2005, Ivan Kozak released the last version of the Polit shell, commemorating it to the 14th Anniversary of the Independence of Ukraine. It has a new the "Blue Bird" default theme.
During all of the time of active development, there was at least 6 contributors (from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa and Belarus), including author, who joined the Polit OS development.

## Features

Polit distributed in a form of zipped folder and floppy disk IMG-file, and could be launched from DOS (MS-DOS, FreeDOS) and Windows 95/98/M on PC or run inside emulators and virtual machines (DOSBox, DOSBox-X, VirtualBox).

### Pros

* Multitasking support.
* Long file name (LFN) support in file manager.
* Vector fonts (CHF) support with anti-aliasing.
* Configurable interface with various modern looking special visual effects, changeable themes and fonts, changeable position and look of UI elements using configuration INI files.
* Distributed with a set of default software and games.
* Compact file size (< 1 MB).
* Low requirements for computer hardware (VESA driver, mouse with a driver for DOS, and 1-3 MB of free space on the harddisk or floppy).
* Free license for free use and modifying.
* Open source code with developer documentation for it.
* Support for КОІ-8, DOS (CP886), Win1251 codepages.
* Keyboard layouts for Ukrainian, English, Belarusian and Russian text input, with a configurable key shortcut for quick layout switch.

### Cons

* Impossible to launch external DOS software, except of own built-in software and software written for Polit.
* Bad support for hardware components and devices due to lack of drivers.
* Limited number of ready to use software (but new software could be created by users with a knowledge of Pascal).

## Software
### Built-in

* Filer — a file manager with a two-panel mode support (similar to File Explorer and Total Commander).
* Wave player — a WAV audio player.
* Friends — an address book (similar to Windows Address Book).
* HTML viewer — a simple web browser with vector fonts support (tested with Google Search at the time).
* Image viewer — supporting opening files from file browser (supported formats: BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG).
* Navigator — a side hidable dock widget for quick access to files and disks.
* Notepad — a text editor (similar to Windows Notepad) with a function for print text documents.
* Printer — a tool for interacting with printers, configuring printers and printing documents.
* Calculator — a simple arithmetic calculator with addition of trigonometric sin/cos/tag calculation of angles in degrees, (similar to Windows Calculator).
* App Wizard — a Pascal program template (.pas) generator, intended to help users to start creating own software for Polit (similar to file template generator in Geany IDE).
* Task Manager — a process monitor and task manager (similar to Windows Task Manager).
* Screenshot — a screenshot software with a F9 function key as keyboard shortcut.
* Settings — a setting dialog for configuring system options and look (also, could be configured by editing configuration INI files in Notepad).
* ScrSetup — display settings manager.
* Tasks panel — includes "Start" menu (like Windows Start menu), and system tray with keyboard layout indicator, analog and digital clocks (if move mouse cursor over it it also shows actual date).
* Terminal — terminal emulator or command prompt (similar Cmd.exe)
* Handbook — a browser to read help docs in HTML format, uses HTML viewer.
* Screesaver — an animated fireworks screensaver.
* Arkanoid — a simplified iplementation of the Arkanoid game.
* Tanks — an implementation of the classic Tank Wars [de] and Scorched Earth games.

### Third party

* Polit Pascal 1.0 (Ukrainian: Політ Паскаль 1.0) — an open-source interpreter and IDE with own implementation of Pascal-like object-oriented programming language, written in Pascal (similar to PyPy).
* Minesweeper (Ukrainian: Сапер) — an open-source implementation of the Minesweeper game in Pascal.

## Similar projects

* ELERA — is a Turkish open-source GUI shell for DOS in Free Pascal and Assembly with a pre-emptive multitasking support, developed by Fatih Kiliç (Turkey).
* FPC DOS — is an open-source DOS Shell in Free Pascal and i8086 assembly, developed by Nikolay Nikolov (Bulgaria) during 2015-2022. Nikolov also developed an open-hardware DOS-compatible computer Tralala 8088.
* Pascal Graphical Environment (also PGE) — wa an open-source GUI DE project for DOS in Pascal, developed by Colin Alston (UK). Project stalled since 2002.
* StreamOS — is a Ukrainian open-source 32-bit GUI shell for DOS in Object Pascal, developed by Oleksandr Natalenko, being a student at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, during 2005-2009. Later Natalenko moved to the Czech Republic, and on 15 June 2024 republished all the sources of StreamOS.
* Many other operating systems and DOS shells in Pascal and Free Pascal created without GUI, but with CLI/TUI instead (FPOS, TORO Kernel, StreamOS. etc.).
* Proolix — is another Ukrainian (but without Ukrainian locale) open-source POSIX-compliant and DOS-compatible operating system for i8086+, developed by Ukrainian programmer Serge 'Prool' Pustovoitoff since 1996. As of November 2023, the project still is active.