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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.
by 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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 agoIt was quite common, specially in the big studios doing games for multiple home computers.
- nkozyra 11y agoIt's weird but when I was a kid I thought GEOS was a toy - I inherently rejected the graphical presentation of "doing things" over the "command line" (which was just BASIC for the most part). Of course, this could be due to not caring for most of the applications launchable from GEOS.
- tcdent 11y agoThe lack of launcher support (like legacy DOS support in Windows) probably killed it. If you were using it, you were also often loading native programs instead of it. Something as simple as a double-click instead of having to reset and "LOAD * ,8,1" would have encouraged the practice of launching into a GUI first.