System Commander

» see v-com.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

System Commander sold one moment of the computing day: the instant after the BIOS finishes and before an operating system takes over. It installed itself into that gap and put up a menu. Whatever you had on the disks appeared in the list, you picked one, and the machine went on booting as though nothing had been inserted. V Communications introduced it in 1993 and kept it alive through the whole era in which having more than one operating system on a personal computer was a normal thing an enthusiast did.

The New York Times wrote it up in May 1998 under a headline about one operating system not being enough for a customer, which is a fair summary of the market. DOS and Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and OS/2 and the early Linux distributions and BeOS all wanted the same machine, and most of them assumed they were the only guest. The package later shipped with a partition manager, Partition Commander, so you could make room for the next one without a reinstall, and reviewers of the day compared it with PartitionMagic and generally preferred PartitionMagic's ability to queue up a series of operations and walk away.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the trick ~

The feature that made it worth money was not the menu. It was hiding partitions. You could configure an installed operating system so that it simply did not see the others, which stopped Windows from helpfully assigning a drive letter to your Linux volume or an installer from writing a boot sector over something that mattered. On the hardware of the time, with filesystems that did not respect each other, that was the difference between a dual-boot machine and a weekend of recovery.

It wanted either DOS or a 32-bit Windows to install from, ran its menus at resolutions up to 1600 by 1200, and reached version 9 in the Vista years, with 9.04 as the last build anyone recorded.

~ the boxed aisle ~

This is a product with an obvious use for me that I never once saw on a shelf. The years when I was dual-booting out of curiosity are the years when the bootloader came free with the distribution: LILO first and then GRUB, written by the same community that gave you the operating system, configured by editing a text file. In Ankara the route to software was a download or a magazine CD rather than a shrink-wrapped utility box with a dollar price on the back.

That is the quiet reason this category died rather than any single competitor. GRUB did the chainloading for nothing, and virtualization took most of the remaining audience, since a second operating system in a window needs no boot menu at all.

~ the paper trail ~

Nobody announced the end, so the date comes from the vendor's own footprint. BVRP Software of Paris bought V Communications in February 2005 and became Avanquest; for three years after that, v-com.com kept serving the product site. Its last full capture is 15 April 2008, about nine kilobytes with the System Commander 9 box art and an upgrade page. Five days later the domain started answering with a redirect into Avanquest's VCOM section, and it never came back.

The catalog page it redirected to is the better witness. On 5 December 2008 that page lists SystemSuite and Fix-It Utilities, with no System Commander anywhere on it, and both of those kept getting new editions into 2010. A product dropped from the shelf while its shelfmates are still being versioned is a discontinued product, whatever the absence of a press release implies. The only date recorded elsewhere is February 2009, in Wikidata, which is a few months later than the vendor's own pages support.

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