8 ms·

GEOS For the Commodore 64

98 points by franze 11y ago

justizin 11y ago
My first computer had PC-GEOS! My uncle was super geeked out about setting us up with it! It was neat, but we still mostly used DOS and Windows 3.1.
boomskats 11y ago
Ahh this brings back so many memories I completely forgot I had. I've spent ages trying to remember where I'd seen that upturned corner navigation before the Google Maps app did it...
pacaro 11y ago
Aargh, I'm now having bad flashbacks about writing for GEOS, they used a very weird preprocessor to bolt an OOP system onto C. Run, don't walk, away from .goc and .goh files...
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  Compared to coding in assembly, was it really worse? (I don't know. The only coding I did for C64/C128 was BASIC and assembly.)
  - david-given 11y ago
    .goc and .goh files was PC GEOS, not C64 GEOS. Here's a fragment: @method MyProcessClass, MSG_META_EXPOSED { GStateHandle gstate = GrCreateState(win); GrBeginUpdate(gstate); @call GameView::MV_REDRAW(win, gstate); GrEndUpdate(gstate); GrDestroyState(gstate); } The GOC files were preprocessed to produce very very manky C which was then compiled with Borland and linked with a custom linker. It was true OO with dynamic dispatch and a deeply strange system for allowing classes to have unspecified superclasses (that were then filled in at runtime programmatically). @call does a method call of MV_REDRAW on the object whose handle in GameView. (There was also @send which did an asynchronous call; if the object belonged to another thread a message would be sent rather than calling the code directly.)
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      That actually sounds very clever. It looks dense, and I'm not able to make much sense of the actual code, but it seems like some very bright folks were behind GEOS (obviously so, since they built so much interesting software for such limited machines). I was fascinated by PC GEOS when it was new, but I was using an Amiga during the era when it was a thing. I only had a brief stint on PCs when Windows 95 came out, and then soon after moved to Linux as my primary OS (usually with a dual booting Windows partition for gaming). The fact that it had multitasking long before Windows, and on XT/AT class machines was pretty damned cool. There were moments where I considered going that route after my C128D, instead of getting an Amiga. Interestingly, there is still a company selling PC GEOS under the name Breadbox Ensemble, and their forum has posts from this year (not a lot of posts...but, still). I had no idea. It still looks about like it did in 1995. I am kinda baffled at who would still be buying and using this stuff...in a world with amazingly high quality Open Source tools to do everything GEOS ever did only better, and able to do it well on a very low powered machine (just like GEOS), it seems really strange to keep flogging that old horse.
      - david-given 11y ago
        It was clever --- far too clever, unfortunately. C and GOC was a bit of an afterthought; GEOS was originally programmed in object-oriented 8086 machine code, via a special assembler called ESP. GOC was a hack to make Borland produce all the same OO magic that ESP did. It was a reasonable object system, not actually that dissimilar from Objective C, but so, so proprietary. The implementation didn't just rely on the 8086 architecture, it was inextricably intertwined with it. It worked like PalmOS where memory was referred to by object handle. To access memory, you'd lock it, then you'd get back a pointer. Once you'd finished, you'd unlock it again. This let the GEOS kernel page in your memory from swap. What it actually did was assign one of your segment descriptors to point at the locked block, which you'd dereference with ds:[offset] or es:[offset]. Very elegant, and totally using the 8086 segment infrastructure the way it was intended to be used... good porting to anything else, however! Hey, I still have my old Geoworks SDK CD. (Which I scrounged free from someone. Useful tip: if you want your platform to be popular, don't make the SDK cost $1000.) I may have accidentally left the PDF of one of the manuals here. http://www.docdroid.net/vclb0s2/concepts.pdf.html http://www.docdroid.net/vclb0s2/concepts.pdf.html Totally ahead of its time. Totally doomed.
  - creadee 11y ago
    I attempted to write programs for C64 GEOS, and I found it worse than assembler! It may have been due to the programmer's manual being for an earlier version of GEOS than I was using (v2), but writing programs that didn't crash seemed to be impossible for me. That said, I recall very little third-party programs appearing for C64 GEOS, so it may have been the case for most programmers who attempted to write for it.
simmons 11y ago
Ah, GEOS. I used it quite a bit when I was a kid -- wrote school reports in geoWrite, made labels in geoPaint, and wrote 6502 assembly code in geoProgrammer. (Well, technically, wrote assembly in geoWrite and then used geoProgrammer to assemble and link -- a very tedious process, indeed.) GEOS applications were always a bit of a dog compared to non-GEOS programs, at least for those of us without any RAM expansion. I once wrote a letter to Berkeley Softworks asking for more information about programming in GEOS (API's, etc.), and was surprised when I got a huge binder in the mail with a printout of the Hitchhiker's Guide to GEOS. [1] [1] http://freepdfs.net/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-geos-lyonlabsorg/1d268f6961a06e175715c883f0f217ad/ http://freepdfs.net/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-geos-lyonlabsor...
- melling 11y ago
  I knew dozens of people with the C64 and I didn't know anyone who used it after the initial buzz wore off. The floppy sat in my shoebox with a hundred other apps. The PAL assembler was a much better tool for writing 6502 assembler. It was one of my first software purchases as a teenager.
  - simmons 11y ago
    The C64 wasn't the best platform for running a GUI, and GEOS required a great deal of patience. I eventually went back to non-GEOS tools for most things (Word Writer 4, yay). GEOS was nonetheless an impressive technical accomplishment. It was amazing to see the sophistication delta between software from the early days of C64 (e.g., those educational programs ported from PET) to what was available towards the end on the exact same hardware.
- swills 11y ago
  I had a middle school shop teacher who used GEOS, but never used it personally. What I find interesting from the PDF you linked is that GEOS was developed on UNIX using a cross assembler and emulator. Never would have expected that.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
cromwellian 11y ago
GEOS had some bleeding edge disk handling in it for a C64. It had random access files with fast-loader and fast-saving. It could also use the 1541 as SWAP space IIRC, and had early support for C64/C128 RAM expansion modules.
- vidarh 11y ago
  The 1541 only has 2K of SRAM, so using it as swap seems a bit pointless, unless you mean it could page out to floppy?
  - simmons 11y ago
    GEOS did support a "SWAP FILE" on the floppy. It wasn't swap in the modern page fault / virtual memory sense, of course. When you loaded a "desk accessory" (Calculator, notepad, etc.) from within another application, it would carve out a piece of RAM large enough for the accessory, write the prior contents of the memory to "SWAP FILE", and load the accessory into the region.
  - cromwellian 11y ago
    Yes, I meant to a floppy.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      Yikes. I had a C64 for years, but never used GEOS. My memories of the speed of the 1541 are not fond memories...
agumonkey 11y ago
Funny, I was just watching the Computer Chronicles about Windows 3.0 release, where they mentioned GEOS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YewNEAIkbG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YewNEAIkbG4
- sixothree 11y ago
  Interesting episode.
artlogic 11y ago
I think the most incredible thing about GEOS are the hobbyist programmers who continued to maintain/modify it well after its mainstream lifetime. I once mentioned to my auto mechanic that I was a programmer, and he invited me into the back room of his garage full of old C64 stuff. He showed me a modified C128 with an IDE interface, running his custom modded version of GEOS (Wheels). He had an accelerator hooked up to the machine and could change the CPU speed from the original C64/128 speed to something that appeared to be 10 times faster. To top off the demo, he showed me the web browser he was working on, bringing up a roughly rendered version of Yahoo's page (it was 1999) on the screen. It turned out my mechanic was the famous (or infamous) Maurice Randall. It's worth searching for his name to learn about his accomplishments in the C64 hobbyist scene (and his unfortunate unreliability).
- paulhauggis 11y ago
  An interesting discussion on this very topic): http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39637&sid=b6a11bc3ea7a88275278e36ac3162acf http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39637&sid=b6a11...
djmips 11y ago
Ah GEOS. It has special meaning to me because I was working on Windows / Mouse GUI desktop system for the C64 when news broke. When I finally saw it I stopped working on my own system because it was so much further ahead. In retrospect I did learn a lot and it was certainly my largest 6502 assembly project ever.
bluedino 11y ago
Didn't AOL for DOS run GEOS? I wondered why my 386SX-16MHz could run AOL's windowed and mouse driven GUI so fast but crawled with Microsoft Windows 3.1
- orionblastar 11y ago
  AOL used a stripped down version called Geoworks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system) They stopped using it when they stopped supporting DOS and switched to a Windows client. Older AOL for DOS 3.5" floppies can take the Geoworks files out and run them by themselves without the AOL client.
  - watchdogtimer 11y ago
    I loved Geoworks--it was how I got introduced to GEOS and how powerful a good GUI desktop could be. I was so disappointed when AOL dropped support of it. :(
    - orionblastar 11y ago
      Microsoft Windows kind of dominated the market once it got bundled with MS-DOS and was part of the OEM PC Tax. Geoworks kind of fell to the side of the road, but it still exists in some form at Breadbox.com: http://www.breadbox.com/ http://www.breadbox.com/ Like GEM, OS/2, Vision, Desqview, Geoworks kind of got killed by Microsoft bundling DOS and Windows to make their monopoly. By the time Windows NT and Windows 95 made it to the market, people went crazy over Windows and forgot the alternatives to it.
orionblastar 11y ago
After the Macintosh came out, it took them one year to write GEOS for the Commodore 64 to do some of the same things a $4000 Macintosh could do on a sub$500 Commodore 64 and 1541 drive. It was the Commodore 64C that came bundled with GEOS. They had a Commodore 128 version and a Commodore 16/Plus4 version of GEOS as well. They also ported it to the Apple II series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
- easter6 11y ago
  And in that same year you could get a sub-$600 machine that could do more than that C64 or Mac: the Atari 520ST! :) of course the Amiga could do more than all 3 machines, but it cost even more than the ST (but nowhere near the cost of a Mac.)
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    Until in 1987 they made the Amiga 500 unit to compete with the 520ST, going back to the C64 the case is the keyboard design. One thing about the Atari ST is that it was considered the real successor to the Commodore 64 because Jack Tremiel was behind it. Nicknamed the Jackintosh with the Magic Sack software it could run Mac software with a Mac ROM chip on a dongle.
rasz_pl 11y ago
I remember a friend showing me GEOS in ~1996, It was a click and 10-30 seconds of waiting followed by another click and another 10-30 seconds of waiting. C64 simply had no memory for GUI OS.
- franze 11y ago
  there was a memory-extension card for the c64 with GEOS pre installed, made it ok-ish fast
  - creadee 11y ago
    Yes, you needed either the C128 or the ram-extension for the C64.
reidrac 11y ago
It is interesting how different perception was 20 years ago. My cousin had a Sinclair PC200 back then, that IIRC was Amstrad's poor attempt to get in to the PC market. That was a 8086 based PC with CGA card, and it came with DOS 3-something and GEOS (don't remember the version). My cousin had a mouse and all, quite uncommon back then, and we tried and experimented with GEOS quite a lot, but we couldn't see the point really. Perhaps was a limitation of the monitor and/or the CGA card (it didn't look to good in the high resolution mode of the CGA, with a very poor refresh rate) or the limitations of the 740 KB floppies, but the CLI that DOS provided was definitely better!
david-given 11y ago
I did a tonne of programming for PC GEOS, aka Geoworks. It was... very cool, in a retarded sort of way. It could do all kinds of awesome things; multithreading! Virtual memory! Vector fonts! Embedding applications in other applications! Pluggable look and feel! Long filenames! Ubiquitous databases everywhere! All on a 8086 with 640kB RAM. But in order to do any of this you had to write programs in a custom C dialect called GOC, compile things with a ghastly mess of Perl and Borland C mangled together, and the architecture was inextricably entangled with the 8086 architecture so it was fundamentally non-portable. (Object-oriented machine code. shudder) There was a debugger. It required two PCs connected via a serial cable... If anyone's interested, I've got some source code here: http://cowlark.com/geos-software/index.html http://cowlark.com/geos-software/index.html (including an ELKS syscall translator which allows you to run Linux-86 binaries on GEOS! I think someone used it, once.)
- david-given 11y ago
  Hey, you can still buy it! http://www.breadbox.com/ http://www.breadbox.com/ A mere $69 (the copy of DOS required to run it on is not included).
worker761 11y ago
Thanks for the memories! Also reminds me of loading Frogger by audio tape on my Sinclair ZX81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
Bonogongo 11y ago
Something similar that I've found for CPCs http://www.symbos.de/ http://www.symbos.de/ Totally amazing.

98 points by franze 11y ago

My first computer had PC-GEOS! My uncle was super geeked out about setting us up with it! It was neat, but we still mostly used DOS and Windows 3.1.

boomskats 11y ago

Ahh this brings back so many memories I completely forgot I had. I've spent ages trying to remember where I'd seen that upturned corner navigation before the Google Maps app did it...

pacaro 11y ago

Aargh, I'm now having bad flashbacks about writing for GEOS, they used a very weird preprocessor to bolt an OOP system onto C. Run, don't walk, away from .goc and .goh files...

SwellJoe 11y ago
Compared to coding in assembly, was it really worse? (I don't know. The only coding I did for C64/C128 was BASIC and assembly.)
- david-given 11y ago
  .goc and .goh files was PC GEOS, not C64 GEOS. Here's a fragment: @method MyProcessClass, MSG_META_EXPOSED { GStateHandle gstate = GrCreateState(win); GrBeginUpdate(gstate); @call GameView::MV_REDRAW(win, gstate); GrEndUpdate(gstate); GrDestroyState(gstate); } The GOC files were preprocessed to produce very very manky C which was then compiled with Borland and linked with a custom linker. It was true OO with dynamic dispatch and a deeply strange system for allowing classes to have unspecified superclasses (that were then filled in at runtime programmatically). @call does a method call of MV_REDRAW on the object whose handle in GameView. (There was also @send which did an asynchronous call; if the object belonged to another thread a message would be sent rather than calling the code directly.)
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    That actually sounds very clever. It looks dense, and I'm not able to make much sense of the actual code, but it seems like some very bright folks were behind GEOS (obviously so, since they built so much interesting software for such limited machines). I was fascinated by PC GEOS when it was new, but I was using an Amiga during the era when it was a thing. I only had a brief stint on PCs when Windows 95 came out, and then soon after moved to Linux as my primary OS (usually with a dual booting Windows partition for gaming). The fact that it had multitasking long before Windows, and on XT/AT class machines was pretty damned cool. There were moments where I considered going that route after my C128D, instead of getting an Amiga. Interestingly, there is still a company selling PC GEOS under the name Breadbox Ensemble, and their forum has posts from this year (not a lot of posts...but, still). I had no idea. It still looks about like it did in 1995. I am kinda baffled at who would still be buying and using this stuff...in a world with amazingly high quality Open Source tools to do everything GEOS ever did only better, and able to do it well on a very low powered machine (just like GEOS), it seems really strange to keep flogging that old horse.
    - david-given 11y ago
      It was clever --- far too clever, unfortunately. C and GOC was a bit of an afterthought; GEOS was originally programmed in object-oriented 8086 machine code, via a special assembler called ESP. GOC was a hack to make Borland produce all the same OO magic that ESP did. It was a reasonable object system, not actually that dissimilar from Objective C, but so, so proprietary. The implementation didn't just rely on the 8086 architecture, it was inextricably intertwined with it. It worked like PalmOS where memory was referred to by object handle. To access memory, you'd lock it, then you'd get back a pointer. Once you'd finished, you'd unlock it again. This let the GEOS kernel page in your memory from swap. What it actually did was assign one of your segment descriptors to point at the locked block, which you'd dereference with ds:[offset] or es:[offset]. Very elegant, and totally using the 8086 segment infrastructure the way it was intended to be used... good porting to anything else, however! Hey, I still have my old Geoworks SDK CD. (Which I scrounged free from someone. Useful tip: if you want your platform to be popular, don't make the SDK cost $1000.) I may have accidentally left the PDF of one of the manuals here. http://www.docdroid.net/vclb0s2/concepts.pdf.html http://www.docdroid.net/vclb0s2/concepts.pdf.html Totally ahead of its time. Totally doomed.
- creadee 11y ago
  I attempted to write programs for C64 GEOS, and I found it worse than assembler! It may have been due to the programmer's manual being for an earlier version of GEOS than I was using (v2), but writing programs that didn't crash seemed to be impossible for me. That said, I recall very little third-party programs appearing for C64 GEOS, so it may have been the case for most programmers who attempted to write for it.

simmons 11y ago

Ah, GEOS. I used it quite a bit when I was a kid -- wrote school reports in geoWrite, made labels in geoPaint, and wrote 6502 assembly code in geoProgrammer. (Well, technically, wrote assembly in geoWrite and then used geoProgrammer to assemble and link -- a very tedious process, indeed.) GEOS applications were always a bit of a dog compared to non-GEOS programs, at least for those of us without any RAM expansion. I once wrote a letter to Berkeley Softworks asking for more information about programming in GEOS (API's, etc.), and was surprised when I got a huge binder in the mail with a printout of the Hitchhiker's Guide to GEOS. [1] [1] http://freepdfs.net/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-geos-lyonlabsorg/1d268f6961a06e175715c883f0f217ad/ http://freepdfs.net/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-geos-lyonlabsor...

melling 11y ago
I knew dozens of people with the C64 and I didn't know anyone who used it after the initial buzz wore off. The floppy sat in my shoebox with a hundred other apps. The PAL assembler was a much better tool for writing 6502 assembler. It was one of my first software purchases as a teenager.
- simmons 11y ago
  The C64 wasn't the best platform for running a GUI, and GEOS required a great deal of patience. I eventually went back to non-GEOS tools for most things (Word Writer 4, yay). GEOS was nonetheless an impressive technical accomplishment. It was amazing to see the sophistication delta between software from the early days of C64 (e.g., those educational programs ported from PET) to what was available towards the end on the exact same hardware.
swills 11y ago
I had a middle school shop teacher who used GEOS, but never used it personally. What I find interesting from the PDF you linked is that GEOS was developed on UNIX using a cross assembler and emulator. Never would have expected that.
- pjmlp 11y ago

cromwellian 11y ago

GEOS had some bleeding edge disk handling in it for a C64. It had random access files with fast-loader and fast-saving. It could also use the 1541 as SWAP space IIRC, and had early support for C64/C128 RAM expansion modules.

vidarh 11y ago
The 1541 only has 2K of SRAM, so using it as swap seems a bit pointless, unless you mean it could page out to floppy?
- simmons 11y ago
  GEOS did support a "SWAP FILE" on the floppy. It wasn't swap in the modern page fault / virtual memory sense, of course. When you loaded a "desk accessory" (Calculator, notepad, etc.) from within another application, it would carve out a piece of RAM large enough for the accessory, write the prior contents of the memory to "SWAP FILE", and load the accessory into the region.
- cromwellian 11y ago
  Yes, I meant to a floppy.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Yikes. I had a C64 for years, but never used GEOS. My memories of the speed of the 1541 are not fond memories...

agumonkey 11y ago

Funny, I was just watching the Computer Chronicles about Windows 3.0 release, where they mentioned GEOS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YewNEAIkbG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YewNEAIkbG4

sixothree 11y ago
Interesting episode.

artlogic 11y ago

I think the most incredible thing about GEOS are the hobbyist programmers who continued to maintain/modify it well after its mainstream lifetime. I once mentioned to my auto mechanic that I was a programmer, and he invited me into the back room of his garage full of old C64 stuff. He showed me a modified C128 with an IDE interface, running his custom modded version of GEOS (Wheels). He had an accelerator hooked up to the machine and could change the CPU speed from the original C64/128 speed to something that appeared to be 10 times faster. To top off the demo, he showed me the web browser he was working on, bringing up a roughly rendered version of Yahoo's page (it was 1999) on the screen. It turned out my mechanic was the famous (or infamous) Maurice Randall. It's worth searching for his name to learn about his accomplishments in the C64 hobbyist scene (and his unfortunate unreliability).

paulhauggis 11y ago
An interesting discussion on this very topic): http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39637&sid=b6a11bc3ea7a88275278e36ac3162acf http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39637&sid=b6a11...

djmips 11y ago

Ah GEOS. It has special meaning to me because I was working on Windows / Mouse GUI desktop system for the C64 when news broke. When I finally saw it I stopped working on my own system because it was so much further ahead. In retrospect I did learn a lot and it was certainly my largest 6502 assembly project ever.

bluedino 11y ago

Didn't AOL for DOS run GEOS? I wondered why my 386SX-16MHz could run AOL's windowed and mouse driven GUI so fast but crawled with Microsoft Windows 3.1

orionblastar 11y ago
AOL used a stripped down version called Geoworks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system) They stopped using it when they stopped supporting DOS and switched to a Windows client. Older AOL for DOS 3.5" floppies can take the Geoworks files out and run them by themselves without the AOL client.
- watchdogtimer 11y ago
  I loved Geoworks--it was how I got introduced to GEOS and how powerful a good GUI desktop could be. I was so disappointed when AOL dropped support of it. :(
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    Microsoft Windows kind of dominated the market once it got bundled with MS-DOS and was part of the OEM PC Tax. Geoworks kind of fell to the side of the road, but it still exists in some form at Breadbox.com: http://www.breadbox.com/ http://www.breadbox.com/ Like GEM, OS/2, Vision, Desqview, Geoworks kind of got killed by Microsoft bundling DOS and Windows to make their monopoly. By the time Windows NT and Windows 95 made it to the market, people went crazy over Windows and forgot the alternatives to it.

orionblastar 11y ago

After the Macintosh came out, it took them one year to write GEOS for the Commodore 64 to do some of the same things a $4000 Macintosh could do on a sub$500 Commodore 64 and 1541 drive. It was the Commodore 64C that came bundled with GEOS. They had a Commodore 128 version and a Commodore 16/Plus4 version of GEOS as well. They also ported it to the Apple II series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

easter6 11y ago
And in that same year you could get a sub-$600 machine that could do more than that C64 or Mac: the Atari 520ST! :) of course the Amiga could do more than all 3 machines, but it cost even more than the ST (but nowhere near the cost of a Mac.)
- orionblastar 11y ago
  Until in 1987 they made the Amiga 500 unit to compete with the 520ST, going back to the C64 the case is the keyboard design. One thing about the Atari ST is that it was considered the real successor to the Commodore 64 because Jack Tremiel was behind it. Nicknamed the Jackintosh with the Magic Sack software it could run Mac software with a Mac ROM chip on a dongle.

rasz_pl 11y ago

I remember a friend showing me GEOS in ~1996, It was a click and 10-30 seconds of waiting followed by another click and another 10-30 seconds of waiting. C64 simply had no memory for GUI OS.

franze 11y ago
there was a memory-extension card for the c64 with GEOS pre installed, made it ok-ish fast
- creadee 11y ago
  Yes, you needed either the C128 or the ram-extension for the C64.

reidrac 11y ago

It is interesting how different perception was 20 years ago. My cousin had a Sinclair PC200 back then, that IIRC was Amstrad's poor attempt to get in to the PC market. That was a 8086 based PC with CGA card, and it came with DOS 3-something and GEOS (don't remember the version). My cousin had a mouse and all, quite uncommon back then, and we tried and experimented with GEOS quite a lot, but we couldn't see the point really. Perhaps was a limitation of the monitor and/or the CGA card (it didn't look to good in the high resolution mode of the CGA, with a very poor refresh rate) or the limitations of the 740 KB floppies, but the CLI that DOS provided was definitely better!

david-given 11y ago

I did a tonne of programming for PC GEOS, aka Geoworks. It was... very cool, in a retarded sort of way. It could do all kinds of awesome things; multithreading! Virtual memory! Vector fonts! Embedding applications in other applications! Pluggable look and feel! Long filenames! Ubiquitous databases everywhere! All on a 8086 with 640kB RAM. But in order to do any of this you had to write programs in a custom C dialect called GOC, compile things with a ghastly mess of Perl and Borland C mangled together, and the architecture was inextricably entangled with the 8086 architecture so it was fundamentally non-portable. (Object-oriented machine code. shudder) There was a debugger. It required two PCs connected via a serial cable... If anyone's interested, I've got some source code here: http://cowlark.com/geos-software/index.html http://cowlark.com/geos-software/index.html (including an ELKS syscall translator which allows you to run Linux-86 binaries on GEOS! I think someone used it, once.)

david-given 11y ago
Hey, you can still buy it! http://www.breadbox.com/ http://www.breadbox.com/ A mere $69 (the copy of DOS required to run it on is not included).

worker761 11y ago

Thanks for the memories! Also reminds me of loading Frogger by audio tape on my Sinclair ZX81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

Bonogongo 11y ago

Something similar that I've found for CPCs http://www.symbos.de/ http://www.symbos.de/ Totally amazing.