The NewDeal Office 3.2 start up screen. NewDeal Office is the descendant of GeoWorks (PC/GEOS) and runs on top of DOS. As of 2002 Breadbox Computer Company LLC has picked up development and sales of this product under the new name "Breadbox Ensemble".

The NewDeal Office 3.2 evaluation version has most of the features of the full commercial version, but is limited to a 45 day trial period from the time you install it after which time it will refuse to start.

The NewDeal evaluation is no longer available for download but it has been replaced by Ensemble Lite that can be downloaded from Breadbox's web site. Ensemble Lite includes a non-time limited desktop GUI and several example applications, but it lacks most of the applications that came with the NewDeal Office evaluation. It will also only run the applications that come with Ensemble Lite. The full commercial versions, of course do not have these limitations.

The default graphical shell is basically a Windows Explorer clone, but it leaves out all of the BS that that newer Windows version have, leaving an extremely usable lightweight user interface that works well even on old 386 machines.

It features a "Computer" icon that lists all of the drives on the system, and file folders open in new windows. Files and folders can be placed on the desktop, although the right-click context menu only has an option for creating new folders.

The task bar is fairly typical, containing buttons for open windows, a clock and a "start" menu. This screen shot shows all of the programs available under the Applications menu.

NewDeal supports a form of long filenames (the same way PC/GEOS does). All files in the "World" folder have a separate filename database that NewDeal looks at instead. NewDeal does not recognize Windows 9x long filenames.

NewDeal includes a VESA driver that enables it to display in very high resolutions if your video card supports the VESA standard. It also has a number of drivers for older video cards, including Hercules mono graphics and CGA cards. (I had to use basic VGA for these screen shots because the screen dumper does not work with higher resolutions).

Here are a few of the NewDeal Office applications, NewCalc - a spreadsheet, NewWrite - a word processor, and NewDraw - a graphics program.

There are other games and accessories, but one that stood out to me as being different from a typical bundled game is this one, a Crossword puzzle program.

NewDeal also includes the old GeoWorks user interface, which can be enabled through the control panel. The NewManager file manager application can also be run directly.

NewDeal includes a built in Internet dial-up utility.

It also includes a web browser called "Skipper" and a number of other internet applications. (Note this screen shot was taken in 16-color mode).

Did I mention it has screen savers?