Scalos

Scalos is a desktop replacement for the original Amiga Workbench GUI, based on a subset of APIs and its own front-end window manager of the same name. Its goal is to emulate the real Workbench behaviour, plus integrating additional functionality and an enhanced look. As stated on its website, the name "Scalos" was inspired by the time-accelerated planet Scalos from the Star Trek TV series' fictional universe.

History

Scalos is a former commercial product originally written in 1999 by programmer Stefan Sommerfield for a software house called AlienDesign. The purpose was to recreate the mouse-and-click experience on Amiga, offering an alternative to the Workbench interface present in versions 3.0 and 3.1 of AmigaOS (at that time already considered obsolete).

A group of English programmers known as Satanic Dreams Software (a software firm developing for Windows, Macintosh and Linux) took over. The release versions 1.1 and 1.2 (internally versions 39.2) came out in 2000 as freeware. These may be found on the Amiga Aminet official online repository. Scalos was finally open sourced in 2012.