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The History of GeoWorks, Microsoft Windows’ Upstart ’90s Competitor (2016)
- compsciphd 9y agoI remember running geoworks on an 8086 with 1MB of ram. ran reasonably well and came with the proto AOL (for some reason I thought it came with a Quantum Link client that looked like an AOL client, but according to wikipedia Quantum Link was already renamed to AOL at this time). It was a pretty amazing piece of code that made that 8086 very usable for a few more years.
- emeraldd 9y agoOut of curiosity, what kind of a machine was that? I didn't think you could get that much ram in an 8086 ...
- glibgil 9y agohttp://lowendmac.com/2014/cpus-intel-8086-and-8088/ http://lowendmac.com/2014/cpus-intel-8086-and-8088/
- compsciphd 9y agoIt was a panasonic of some sort. Don't remember the details that clearly. Remember the turbo button, and I remember being upset that Wolfenstein 3D required a 286 and wouldn't run on it. I'm also positive it came with more than 640k of ram, as would go through the tricks to load things in the upper portion to have more "normal" ram for games and the like.
- robin_reala 9y agoI’m surprised that it came with a turbo button; those were a hack to downclock the bus to a lower speed to get old software that had assumed a specific clock speed to work correctly. Would be unusual on an 8086.
- rzzzt 9y agoSome of them just enabled/disabled the cache to achieve slowdown; the 7-segment display on the front of the case was all a ruse! A set of jumpers controlled what value to show depending on the state of the switch.
- ido 9y agolots of 8088/8086 "turbo xt"s had their CPU run at 8-10mhz vs 4.77mhz for the original IBM PC & XT.
- twoodfin 9y agoYup, I had an 8Mhz Hyundai XT clone with the same "feature".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 9y agoYea, the DOS AOL client looked like Windows 3.1 but it ran so much faster on my 386/16
- pacaro 9y agoI (briefly) had to write code to run on GeoWorks GEOS. The code was written in a dialect of C with object oriented features that was compiled from .goc and .goh files to .c files in a manner similar to cfront. It was not a pleasant experience. Edit: This was in 1997. We were writing a web browser for the Brother Geobook which was a device with late 90s PDA capabilities in the form factor of a late 90s laptop. I don't think that it was a particularly successful product.
- pjmlp 9y agoI thought it was 100% Assembly, interesting to know it wasn't the case.
- billpg 9y agoIn Cambridge, later moving to Bury StEdmunds? (If you don't know what I'm talking about, I thought you were someone I briefly used to work with. Sorry.)
- pacaro 9y agoI joined STNC in October 97, so moved in the opposite direction, starting in Bury St Edmunds and moving to Cambridge after the acquisition!
- billpg 9y agoAh, you would have joined shortly after I left, so you may have been my replacement. Did they give you the email sending/receiving components too?
- pacaro 9y agoFortunately not, I mostly finished the colour port. And then Brother cancelled the contract (or at least didn't choose us for the colour device). I still see Ran from time to time (we're both at Amazon)
- 0x445442 9y agoBy the early 90s pc clones were much cheaper than $2K and I'd reckon OS/2 was a much bigger competitor to Windows than GEOS.
- ams6110 9y agoOn the other hand, in the same era (~1993) you could have had what was effectively Mac OS X (NEXTSTEP) which ran on x86 clones at that time (though with a fairly narrow set of supported hardware). Absolutely blew away anything offered by Microsoft, Apple, or IBM at that time.
- rrdharan 9y agoYou could also have had an Amiga which AIUI blew away NeXTSTEP as far as price/performance? Not really speaking from a position of expertise on the matter, since I've only ever seen (and never used) a Video Toaster and the only NeXT machine I've ever used is the one in the computer museum in Google's NYC office.
- ido 9y agoamiga was no longer particularly cutting edge by the time VGA and 386s became common in the 90s, its advantage was astonishing mostly during the 80s and very early 90s (8088-286 era).
- lukeh 9y agoYup, NEXTSTEP was pretty nice. I still miss its UI. I think I started using it in 1993 (just).
- dragonwriter 9y ago> I'd reckon OS/2 was a much bigger competitor to Windows than GEOS. GEOS was a competitor to Windows 2/3 (a DOS add-on) and OS/2 was a competitor to Windows NT.
- moonbug22 9y agoUsed to swear by my HP OmniGo 100.
- jaclaz 9y agoAs a side note the New Deal Office: http://toastytech.com/guis/nd32.html http://toastytech.com/guis/nd32.html and the Breadbox Ensemble which was built from the ashes of GeoWorks: http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html were not at all bad, and for low powered older machines were actually a godsend.
- mnm1 9y agoI loved Geoworks. It did things on my 386 that Windows 3.1 had no hope of doing ever (like loading and working). Also, the banner program wasn't just useful with dot-matrix printers. I had an inkjet and remember many birthdays printing out banners for my family (we used Scotch tape to put them together). Good times.
- krallja 9y agoWhy didn't people load continuous feed paper into inkjets? It seems like it would have worked. I never tried it either.
- mnm1 9y agoNever really thought about it, but the banners were rare (about four a year) so it wasn't a big deal. Also, the inkjet paper was conveniently around. :)
- tinus_hn 9y agoInkjets printed pages have to dry or the ink will smudge, so printers (at least those of that era) have a mechanism that holds the page for a few seconds before dropping it on the stack of completed pages.
- krallja 9y agoSeems like having the banner pour over the edge of a table would give it enough time to dry, too.
- tinus_hn 9y agoThere's a million ways you could make it work but the default way will lead to a big mess so the printers don't allow you to use continuous paper feed. It's kind of a niche feature anyway.
- Lerc 9y agoI was blown away by Geoworks. Using a 25MHz 286 felt like a power machine. I remember printing a page with a Giant lower case e on it to see if it scaled it up to full page nicely. It printed two pages. The second just had a tiny triangle of black on it. Looking at my document I saw the end of the e had just clipped past the edge of the page. At the time WYSIWYG was a bullet point promise that never delivered. Seeing it actually happen was amazing. That it was in a product that had the feel of "Of course it does it that way, because that's how it should be done" I often lament that it was never an Open Source project. It got passed around companies looking to use it in some niche or other while it slowly decayed. It had enough enthusiasts that as an open project it would have developed.
- staofbur 9y agoAcorn delivered proper WYSIWYG that actually worked on RiscOS around the same time. Everyone else was still playing with WordPerfect. TechWriter depicted below and impression were ridiculously powerful: http://www.mw-software.com/icon-tech/Products/TechWriter/TechWriter%20pro.html http://www.mw-software.com/icon-tech/Products/TechWriter/Tec... So while your peers were just about getting a 386 with DOS/windows 3, you had a 32-bit ARM workstation with full anti aliased font rendering and production grade print capability. Shame the kernel was poo and the file system so disparate to everything else or it may have taken off.
- pjmlp 9y agoAmiga users could enjoy the likes of PageStream and Papyrus Office, also about the same time.
- rrdharan 9y agoI remember reading about (or at least seeing cool looking ads) for GeoWorks, DESQview (and DESQview/X!), and GEM in magazines like Byte in the early 90s. I was always sad that I never got to try out any of them on my machine.
- compsciphd 9y agoI used them all. They all lost to windows because of "Developers Developers Developers". i.e. no one really wrote apps for them (besides AOL for Geoworks). Desqview was neat it allowed you to multitask dos apps, but dos 5 basically included same functionality in a more restricted forms (basically how MSFT did to all of Quarterdeck's stuff). Desqview/X was nice if you were in an unix environment, but vast majority of users were not. GEM was along the same lines as geoworks, but recall it being less usefull.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI seem to remember the main reason people ran GEM was because it was bundled with Ventura DTP software.
- rjsw 9y agoI wrote software for GEM, both on PCs and the Atari ST.
- UncleSlacky 9y agoOpenGEM has been a thing for a while now, ever since DR open-sourced it: http://www.opendawn.com/opengem/ http://www.opendawn.com/opengem/ It's even an optional extra for FreeDOS, if you want to try it in a VM: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/opengem.html http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dist...
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago> That computer wasn’t super-fast—what, with its 40-megabyte hard drive and one megabyte of RAM—and, as a result, it really benefited from the lightweight, object-oriented approach of GeoWorks. …am I the only one that made a double-take at this? I don't associate OOP with being lightweight. It's either oxymoronic or irrelevant.
- IncRnd 9y agoI think that flavor of OO was more about encapsulation, orthogonality, and modularity before OO meant the things that it means today.
- mongol 9y agoObject-oriented in those days referred also to other things than programmming. How do you cut-and-paste? You select, then cut. You work with the selection as an object, that you can cut, delete, make bold, move. This is "obvious" today, but actually not. Some programs then worked such as you execute the command ("cut"), then enter select mode, and confirm to cut. Kind of like vi. Another example:Drag a file to trashcan was object oriented.
- wvenable 9y agoMuch of the OS was written in an object-oriented assembly language! This is also what doomed GeoWorks; much of OS was written so low-level is was impossible to port PC/GEOS from 8086 to newer processors.
- svachalek 9y agoGeoWorks was pretty cool on the 386 but GEOS on the Commodore 64 was just unreal -- it was slow and required some tedious disk swapping but even the idea of selectable, proportional fonts at different font sizes among its many other features was amazing on a 1MHz CPU, 64k RAM system.
- krallja 9y agoI picked up my first C64 at a garage sale in the late 90s, and one of the disks it came with was GEOS. It really surprised me when it loaded and I realized what I was looking at.
- eru 9y agoI also had GEOS on a C64, but I remember it being a cartridge---so no disk swapping required. I picked mine up at a garage sale, too. As an aside: I just learned/remembered that the original Nintendo Game Boy ran at roughly four times the CPU frequency of the C64.
- code_duck 9y agoI used GEOS often on my C64 as a child. It was my first experience with a graphical desktop interface and seamlessly segued into the Amiga, for me. I recall the paint program, with its textured fills, and all the simple bitmap tools everyone is familiar with today in MS Paint. The word processing app, really more like desktop publishing. The general file management and window system... It seems all rather forward thinking for 1986. It seems like the concepts for most of our software tends to be around for long before we have the technology to do it properly. All the pre-internet machines I had later just did what my Commodore 64 and GEOS did, but faster and with more colors.
- alexhutcheson 9y agoSteve Yegge had an interesting take on what it was like to work at GeoWorks: > OK: I went to the University of Washington and [then] I got hired by this company called Geoworks, doing assembly-language programming, and I did it for five years. To us, the Geoworkers, we wrote a whole operating system, the libraries, drivers, apps, you know: a desktop operating system in assembly. 8086 assembly! It wasn't even good assembly! We had four registers! [Plus the] si [register] if you counted, you know, if you counted 386, right? It was horrible. > I mean, actually we kind of liked it. It was Object-Oriented Assembly. It's amazing what you can talk yourself into liking, which is the real irony of all this. And to us, C++ was the ultimate in Roman decadence. I mean, it was equivalent to going and vomiting so you could eat more. They had IF! We had jump CX zero! Right? They had "Objects". Well we did too, but I mean they had syntax for it, right? I mean it was all just such weeniness. And we knew that we could outperform any compiler out there because at the time, we could! > So what happened? Well, they went bankrupt. Why? Now I'm probably disagreeing – I know for a fact that I'm disagreeing with every Geoworker out there. I'm the only one that holds this belief. But it's because we wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good tools, world class tools: trust me, you need 'em. But at some point, man... > The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right? > This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times. > Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore! http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...
- sho_hn 9y agoHmmm. They ported GEOS to all sorts of ISAs though. Did they eventually abstract over 286 assembly?
- rajatrocks 9y agoWhen I was an undergrad in the CS dept at U.C. Berkeley (88-92), Geoworks is where >everyone< wanted to work.
- fred_is_fred 9y agoI loved GEOS too, used it on my C64. It was probably black magic that they got it to run so well on there.
- hoodoof 9y agoBack in those days, Windows had an absolute lock on the industry for several reasons: 1: it was the incumbent 2: there were no hardware drivers for any other operating system 3: there was software for Microsoft operating systems, and no useful software for any other OS 4: Microsoft has legal contracts with the hardware manufacturers which required that a icense fee be paid regardless of whether or not Windows shipped with each machine. 5: probably more reasons As an outcome of the above it turned out to be impossible for any other OS to get a foothold on the PC. It's hgard for people to understand now, but there was still an opening for some other OS to get a foothold. In the end, another OS turned up and started making major headway on the PC. It succeeded against Windows in the way that such battles tend to be played out - by playing to a different set of rules. That OS of course was Linux and its rules were to be free, to have a collaborative development model, to be server focused, and to have the fortunate timing of being at the start of the era of connected computing. I remember being startled that I could get a free operating system by buying an issue of a computer magazine at the newsagent with a CDROM on the front containing Linux. Eventually the seemingly impossible happened and an OS came along that beat Microsoft on the desktop, or at least competed effectively with Microsoft Windows - and that of course was OSX. And OSX against succeeded by playing to its own rules. No need for hardware drivers for every device under the sun because they it only ran on Apple hardware. It had applications from the Macintosh user base (and Microsoft), and turned out to be a really nicely integrated and functional OS (IMO). Its a pity GEOS didn't make headway, at the time I really wanted SOMETHING, ANYTHING to give Microsoft effective competition because it looked back then like it was going to be 1,000 years of Microsoft in first place with no second, third or fourth place runners up. BeOS also gets points for having a try at competing with Microsoft.
- dfox 9y agoBack in those days, mostly nobody cared about driver support. In Windows 3.1, there were three classes of things that you could even install driver for: graphics cards (if you wanted more than 640x480, which most people didn't care about), printers (windows had ~70 different drivers, on the other hand most printers were compatible with some defacto standard) and other devices which effectively were sound cards. Both windows and geos mostly relied on DOS and BIOS for things like filesystem and block device access, so for scsi disks, zip drives and similar you either needed DOS driver or just correct BIOS ROM module on the card. This only changed with Windows 95, which still could use DOS drivers, but reliability and performance suffered in that case. Native 32bit windows drivers were built on top of Plug and Play model, which has the unfortunate feature that given device is either recognized by windows automatically or needs specific driver for that specific device (surprising amount of these "drivers" are plain text files that just map the device id onto some standard windows driver).
- davidgerard 9y agoI used GeoWorks for serious work in 1994, because the place I was working was too stingy to spring for a Windows 3.1 licence. Fabulously easy to use, and crashed at the drop of a hat losing all unsaved work ... frickin' Win3.1 WordPad would have been superior, certainly in stability at least ...
- Rondom 9y agoIn Win 3.1 it was still called Write. If I am not mistaken mswrite.exe will launch WordPad to this date (and pbrush.exe MS Paint)
- davidgerard 9y agoThat's the one!