9 ms·

GeoWorks: The Other “Windows”

125 points by janandonly 5y ago

dmead 5y ago
I'm not surprised at the sun workstation requirement. All those screenshots reminded me of CDE. Was it just repackaged Solaris stuff? Edit. The answer is yes.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  No, but it was licensed Motif (the widget set that CDE used). GeoWorks was excellent at what we would call "themes". The released versions allowed the user to choose widgets that either looked like early Microsoft Windows or Motif. And there were screenshots of unreleased builds that allowed Macintosh and NextStep theming as well, but these weren't shipped (probably over fears of their legality).
- coldacid 5y ago
  PC/GEOS took the Motif appearance, but I'm pretty certain that it didn't include the actual Motif toolkit. The source was essentially all hand-tuned x86 assembly. It would have been impossible to simply repackage anything from SunOS (Solaris didn't exist yet).
- notacoward 5y ago
  Seems very unlikely, at least until near the end of the product's lifetime. CDE and the underlying infrastructure were implemented in network-oriented and not-very-efficient ways that would not have been very compatible with contemporary PCs let alone the C64 where GEOS started. The SunOS (not Solaris yet) build requirement was a different reflection of that capability gap, similar to why I had to use a PC to develop software for an even less powerful Apple IIgs at around the same time. The appearance might have been similar, perhaps even deliberately, but copying the implementation would not have been a route to even the minimal success they had.
notacoward 5y ago
Related: Atari GEM (1985) https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue60/175_1_GEM_A_New_Look_For_IBM_And_Atari.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue60/175_1_GEM_A_N...
- coldacid 5y ago
  More competitor than simply related. At least on the PC front.
  - notacoward 5y ago
    Isn't competition a kind of relationship? I kind of thought that anyone interested in one contemporary graphical Windows alternative might be interested in another. I would have mentioned Desqview too, but we already had a story about that very recently.
    - coldacid 5y ago
      That's why I said "simply related" in my comment.
    - opless 5y ago
      [OT] Lundukes writeup of desqview X https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1990s https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1... Was something I aspired to acquire, but never did. Just running real-mode Win 3.1 in a window was a pretty awesome feat.
  - einr 5y ago
    Yeah, GEM from Digital Research had nothing to do with GEOS/GeoWorks, apart from being DOS-based graphical interfaces that attempted to compete with Windows.
    - notacoward 5y ago
      > apart from being DOS-based graphical interfaces Yeah, apart from that. "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" As if someone interested in the history of such interfaces can even put that one into proper context without considering contemporary developments.
cowmix 5y ago
GeoWorks was great. This document I used to get investors for my ISP back in late '92 was created in GeoWorks (and printed on a dotmatrix printer.) Not too shabby for a 286 with 1M of RAM. https://www.dropbox.com/s/n78x5cp8na4iilq/InternetDirectIncProscpectus_akaInternetHutInc..pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/n78x5cp8na4iilq/InternetDirectIncP...
- coldacid 5y ago
  It was really amazing what could be done with PC/GEOS in all its incarnations on even the lowest-powered of hardware. It's to be expected, though, considering what Berkeley Softworks could pull out of a C64 with classic GEOS!
  - II2II 5y ago
    While the C64 implementation of GEOS was an amazing example of working within limited constraints, I am left wondering how much it harmed the reputation of GEOS on other platforms. From my recollections, the frequent disk access on Commodore's notoriously slow drives resulted in a product that was barely usable. When I finally tried GeoWorks on a PC, I was stunned by it's performance and functionality. Unfortunately this was well past its prime since I avoided it for many years because of that initial experience.
    - coldacid 5y ago
      Disk accesses were faster with 1571 drives than 1541s, for sure, and having a supported RAM expansion could cut down on the number of accesses needed to do anything. Similarly, GEOS 128 got away with fewer accesses as it could make use of the extra RAM available (although running GEOS 64 on a 128 would be no better than running it on a C64). That GEOS 64 was "barely usable" was more a reflection of what the Commodore 64 could provide than anything else. And I think more people than not recognized that fact. The problem with PC/GEOS is that it arrived at a time when Microsoft was releasing Windows 3.0 and trying to strangle competition in that space. Had Berkeley started working on it much earlier and got it out the door in '88 or '89, it might have had better success than it did.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Sadly C64 arrived on the scene when the Amiga was launched. It would have been amazing if the C64 was launched with Geos and apps would have been written for it (An Amiga was my first computer with a mouse, I wrote a text windowing system for my Amstrad which was my first GUI).
- mattl 5y ago
  Amstrad CPC?
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    Yes!
    - mattl 5y ago
      What was your program called?
      - KingOfCoders 5y ago
        I didn't have a name I think. Now I wonder from what GUI I got the inspiration. As far as I remember it used the borders of the character set. It was written in Z80 assembly and could be used with | commands (I found | commands amazing in Basic). I was a kid and I had no distribution beside some friends. Only later with the Amiga I got distribution with magazines.
        mattl 5y ago
        Yeah | commands were amazing
davidgerard 5y ago
I used GeoWorks in a job in 1994, on a 386sx, I forget how much RAM. It was excellent, thoroughly up to the task! ... except it crashed at the drop of a hat, multiple times a day. Most annoying. They wouldn't spring the whole $45? for a Windows 3 license. Should try the open source version, and see how 27 years' memories hold up - probably badly.
api 5y ago
I played with GEOS for the Commodore 64 when I was a kid. It wasn't really that useful on a system that tiny, but it's an amazing testament to what can be done on a tiny machine by skilled programmers who aren't larding everything up with layers and layers of abstraction. The Amiga was way, way ahead of its time. Commodore is really a tragedy. There is a parallel universe out there somewhere where Commodore survived and the Amiga evolved into today's equivalent of the Macintosh. It just shows that the best tech does not necessarily win. In fact it often doesn't. Winning in the market requires a large confluence of factors including network effects, timing, availability of capital, etc. Being good helps but it doesn't make it for you.
- fatnoah 5y ago
  I also used Geos as a kid. I played with geoPaint a lot, used geoPublish to make newspapers with my friend, and used geoWrite to do reports and papers for school. It was amazing what could be done in that environment.
wazoox 5y ago
I remember that the Borland Office suite with Ami Pro and Quattro Pro was available on GEOS and worked like a charm on a low-end 386 :)
- Narishma 5y ago
  Not Ami Pro. That was a Windows application from the very first version.
- lproven 5y ago
  Yeah, no, I think you remember incorrectly. Quattro Pro was a DOS app, but it had a look-and-feel that resembled PC GEOS. What you're thinking of as Amí Pro, I don't know. Samna Amí was a Windows app from the beginning – the first Windows word processor, I think. MS Word 5.5 & 6 had a CUA appearance, but drawn in text mode. WordPerfect 6.x for DOS does have an optional graphics mode that is superficially Windows/GEOS-like.
  - wazoox 5y ago
    Actually there was a Quattro Pro version for GEOS (it's still downloadable somewhere). That's the Ami Pro part I rememeber incorrectly :)
    - lproven 5y ago
      A DOS app that had a GEOS-like look and feel. It's mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)#Versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)... It was a DOS app with a self-drawn GUI -- you can see some screenshots here: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a0050c-c2a8-2d60-11c3-a4e284a2c3a5 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a0050c-c2a8-2d60-11c3-a4... ... and here: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c389727e-5fc2-bac3-bd11-c3a4c2ac5a54 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c389727e-5fc2-bac3-bd11-c3...
xattt 5y ago
Why were so many window managers dependent on DOS back then? I get the impression that developers were stuck in a paradigm that using x86 meant the use of some form of DOS as a back-end. Contrast to today, and there’s a post on HN every other week about implementing some hobby OS.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  Because DOS already did everything reliably and in a way that the users expect. If your window manager had any behaviour slightly different from DOS - such as using the current timestamp when copying a file - then users would notice and complain. That was a very long trail of behaviours to copy. Or just rely on DOS.
- bluedino 5y ago
  There were DOS clones and other operating systems back then. CP/M, DR-DOS (take a look at VIEWMAX), PC-MOS, VM/386... Part of the problem was you needed to get your OS on all the computers out there, most clone builders had agreements with Microsoft. The other was you needed DOS compatibility, or else you didn't have any software to run.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    I wouldn't call CP/M and DR-DOS "clones" of MS-DOS. It's more the other way around: MS-DOS originated as a x86 clone of CP/M!
    - bluedino 5y ago
      I meant dos clones and other operating systems
- simonh 5y ago
  GEOS didn't really rely on DOS, it just used it as a launcher and for some basic I/O for compatibility's sake. It would have been trivial to cut loose from it, but why bother? Customers would just have worried that it wouldn't run on their 'DOS' computers.
weinzierl 5y ago
“GEOS did not pioneer the GUI; most of its features were already present in the larger OSes of the day, like the classic Mac (albeit, not Windows). What GEOS did show is that cheap, low-power, commodity hardware and simple office productivity software worked. You did not need a $2000 machine to type a simple letter and print it.” To me, GEOS was a tech demo - an incredible tech demo - but I did not, and don't know anyone, who ever used it productively. Not even to type a simple letter and print it. There were much more efficient ways to do that. My caveat is that I say this from the "cheap, low-power, commodity hardware" home computer perspective. That GEOS ran on my C64 was mind-blowing, but not particularly useful.
- gilmore606 5y ago
  I did! At age 14 I used it to make newsletters for my church. It was a big step up for me from Newsroom, which could only layout in a 2x3 grid -- I could finally do WYSIWYG column-flows with embedded clip art! GeOS felt like the future to me, because it was (or seemed to be) treating the screen as an arbitrary pixel grid, free from the constraints of a 40x24 char array and 8 sprites.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I did not, and don't know anyone, who ever used it productively. Not even to type a simple letter and print it. There were much more efficient ways to do that. I knew an east coast limousine company that ran its whole business on it.
- themadturk 5y ago
  See my other comment; it was highly usable and I was productive with it creating newsletters.
- svachalek 5y ago
  Likewise, I used it for letters and school papers. Its time was brief but it was fully functional, not just a demo.
thanatos519 5y ago
The PC version of GeoWorks even rocked on my souped-up IBM PC 5150. The display PostScript was a perfect preview of the printouts from my 9-pin dot matrix printer.
andrew_ 5y ago
Oh man, nostalgia! That ran on our first home PC, and it was where at the age of 12 I learned what a cookie was. The days!
simonh 5y ago
And then there was GEM, the other 'other' windows. I worked for a year doing PC support for a local health authority here in the UK in 1989 and a few of the secretaries used GEM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)
InTheArena 5y ago
I loved geoworks. It would scream on my 386SX with 40mb hard disk. It was a joy to use. It taught me a valuable life lesson that I still return to. Watching a clearly superior platform be destroyed by inferior technology, but superior business savvy (and shady ethics) taught me that sometimes the better technology looses, and that life isn't fair.
akoster 5y ago
It was neat to play with in a VM using the (quasi-legal) copy from WinWorld [1] as well as its derivatives Breadbox Ensemble [2] and New Deal Office [3]. [1] https://winworldpc.com/product/geos/2x https://winworldpc.com/product/geos/2x [2] https://winworldpc.com/product/breadbox-ensemble/4 https://winworldpc.com/product/breadbox-ensemble/4 [3] https://winworldpc.com/product/new-deal-office/2000 https://winworldpc.com/product/new-deal-office/2000
pavlov 5y ago
Some interesting notes about GeoWorks' architecture in Steve Yegge's blog from 2008: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st... The whole thing was written in x86 assembly — 15 million lines! And that proved its eventual downfall. Here's the quote from the post: -- "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! "Small systems are not only easier to optimize, they're possible to optimize. And I mean globally optimize." --
- 5y ago
azinman2 5y ago
All of the sudden HN seems to be getting a ton of articles and Wikipedia links to all things DOS these days. Just a fervor of nostalgia?
- detaro 5y ago
  And people seeing one post and being remembered of other, related things, and submitting them (or mentioning them in comments and then someone else thinks they are worth submitting on their own). You often get topic clusters that way.
- gorkish 5y ago
  Sorry, we accidentally left you off of the #DOScember memo, but yes it's been a thing for a few years.
a-dub 5y ago
the geos version of aol was pretty brilliant for its time. prodigy technically predated it, but prodigy looked like crap (think bloomberg terminal) while early aol was all geos. i think i had a discounted early adopter "charter membership" for aol... shame it didn't come with stock.
rdp36 5y ago
I loved my HP Omnigo http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=200 http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=200 I should look for one to buy...
Damogran6 5y ago
MAN I'm glad you posted this...with OS/@ and DesqViewX posts, I kept wracking my brain trying to remember this one. It's dot-matrix 'laser quality' mode went over each line 6 times...so wasteful, so pretty.
drewzero1 5y ago
I have an HP OmniGo 100 that uses this, and it turned out as a pretty usable mobile operating system (for a 386 palmtop, at least). If I didn't know there was DOS underneath, I would've thought it was custom software like PalmOS.

125 points by janandonly 5y ago

I'm not surprised at the sun workstation requirement. All those screenshots reminded me of CDE. Was it just repackaged Solaris stuff? Edit. The answer is yes.

jhbadger 5y ago
No, but it was licensed Motif (the widget set that CDE used). GeoWorks was excellent at what we would call "themes". The released versions allowed the user to choose widgets that either looked like early Microsoft Windows or Motif. And there were screenshots of unreleased builds that allowed Macintosh and NextStep theming as well, but these weren't shipped (probably over fears of their legality).
coldacid 5y ago
PC/GEOS took the Motif appearance, but I'm pretty certain that it didn't include the actual Motif toolkit. The source was essentially all hand-tuned x86 assembly. It would have been impossible to simply repackage anything from SunOS (Solaris didn't exist yet).
notacoward 5y ago
Seems very unlikely, at least until near the end of the product's lifetime. CDE and the underlying infrastructure were implemented in network-oriented and not-very-efficient ways that would not have been very compatible with contemporary PCs let alone the C64 where GEOS started. The SunOS (not Solaris yet) build requirement was a different reflection of that capability gap, similar to why I had to use a PC to develop software for an even less powerful Apple IIgs at around the same time. The appearance might have been similar, perhaps even deliberately, but copying the implementation would not have been a route to even the minimal success they had.

notacoward 5y ago

Related: Atari GEM (1985) https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue60/175_1_GEM_A_New_Look_For_IBM_And_Atari.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue60/175_1_GEM_A_N...

coldacid 5y ago
More competitor than simply related. At least on the PC front.
- notacoward 5y ago
  Isn't competition a kind of relationship? I kind of thought that anyone interested in one contemporary graphical Windows alternative might be interested in another. I would have mentioned Desqview too, but we already had a story about that very recently.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    That's why I said "simply related" in my comment.
  - opless 5y ago
    [OT] Lundukes writeup of desqview X https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1990s https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1... Was something I aspired to acquire, but never did. Just running real-mode Win 3.1 in a window was a pretty awesome feat.
- einr 5y ago
  Yeah, GEM from Digital Research had nothing to do with GEOS/GeoWorks, apart from being DOS-based graphical interfaces that attempted to compete with Windows.
  - notacoward 5y ago
    > apart from being DOS-based graphical interfaces Yeah, apart from that. "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" As if someone interested in the history of such interfaces can even put that one into proper context without considering contemporary developments.

cowmix 5y ago

GeoWorks was great. This document I used to get investors for my ISP back in late '92 was created in GeoWorks (and printed on a dotmatrix printer.) Not too shabby for a 286 with 1M of RAM. https://www.dropbox.com/s/n78x5cp8na4iilq/InternetDirectIncProscpectus_akaInternetHutInc..pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/n78x5cp8na4iilq/InternetDirectIncP...

coldacid 5y ago
It was really amazing what could be done with PC/GEOS in all its incarnations on even the lowest-powered of hardware. It's to be expected, though, considering what Berkeley Softworks could pull out of a C64 with classic GEOS!
- II2II 5y ago
  While the C64 implementation of GEOS was an amazing example of working within limited constraints, I am left wondering how much it harmed the reputation of GEOS on other platforms. From my recollections, the frequent disk access on Commodore's notoriously slow drives resulted in a product that was barely usable. When I finally tried GeoWorks on a PC, I was stunned by it's performance and functionality. Unfortunately this was well past its prime since I avoided it for many years because of that initial experience.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    Disk accesses were faster with 1571 drives than 1541s, for sure, and having a supported RAM expansion could cut down on the number of accesses needed to do anything. Similarly, GEOS 128 got away with fewer accesses as it could make use of the extra RAM available (although running GEOS 64 on a 128 would be no better than running it on a C64). That GEOS 64 was "barely usable" was more a reflection of what the Commodore 64 could provide than anything else. And I think more people than not recognized that fact. The problem with PC/GEOS is that it arrived at a time when Microsoft was releasing Windows 3.0 and trying to strangle competition in that space. Had Berkeley started working on it much earlier and got it out the door in '88 or '89, it might have had better success than it did.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Sadly C64 arrived on the scene when the Amiga was launched. It would have been amazing if the C64 was launched with Geos and apps would have been written for it (An Amiga was my first computer with a mouse, I wrote a text windowing system for my Amstrad which was my first GUI).

mattl 5y ago
Amstrad CPC?
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Yes!
  - mattl 5y ago
    What was your program called?
    - KingOfCoders 5y ago
      I didn't have a name I think. Now I wonder from what GUI I got the inspiration. As far as I remember it used the borders of the character set. It was written in Z80 assembly and could be used with | commands (I found | commands amazing in Basic). I was a kid and I had no distribution beside some friends. Only later with the Amiga I got distribution with magazines.
      - mattl 5y ago
        Yeah | commands were amazing

davidgerard 5y ago

I used GeoWorks in a job in 1994, on a 386sx, I forget how much RAM. It was excellent, thoroughly up to the task! ... except it crashed at the drop of a hat, multiple times a day. Most annoying. They wouldn't spring the whole $45? for a Windows 3 license. Should try the open source version, and see how 27 years' memories hold up - probably badly.

api 5y ago

I played with GEOS for the Commodore 64 when I was a kid. It wasn't really that useful on a system that tiny, but it's an amazing testament to what can be done on a tiny machine by skilled programmers who aren't larding everything up with layers and layers of abstraction. The Amiga was way, way ahead of its time. Commodore is really a tragedy. There is a parallel universe out there somewhere where Commodore survived and the Amiga evolved into today's equivalent of the Macintosh. It just shows that the best tech does not necessarily win. In fact it often doesn't. Winning in the market requires a large confluence of factors including network effects, timing, availability of capital, etc. Being good helps but it doesn't make it for you.

fatnoah 5y ago
I also used Geos as a kid. I played with geoPaint a lot, used geoPublish to make newspapers with my friend, and used geoWrite to do reports and papers for school. It was amazing what could be done in that environment.

wazoox 5y ago

I remember that the Borland Office suite with Ami Pro and Quattro Pro was available on GEOS and worked like a charm on a low-end 386 :)

Narishma 5y ago
Not Ami Pro. That was a Windows application from the very first version.
lproven 5y ago
Yeah, no, I think you remember incorrectly. Quattro Pro was a DOS app, but it had a look-and-feel that resembled PC GEOS. What you're thinking of as Amí Pro, I don't know. Samna Amí was a Windows app from the beginning – the first Windows word processor, I think. MS Word 5.5 & 6 had a CUA appearance, but drawn in text mode. WordPerfect 6.x for DOS does have an optional graphics mode that is superficially Windows/GEOS-like.
- wazoox 5y ago
  Actually there was a Quattro Pro version for GEOS (it's still downloadable somewhere). That's the Ami Pro part I rememeber incorrectly :)
  - lproven 5y ago
    A DOS app that had a GEOS-like look and feel. It's mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)#Versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)... It was a DOS app with a self-drawn GUI -- you can see some screenshots here: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a0050c-c2a8-2d60-11c3-a4e284a2c3a5 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a0050c-c2a8-2d60-11c3-a4... ... and here: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c389727e-5fc2-bac3-bd11-c3a4c2ac5a54 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c389727e-5fc2-bac3-bd11-c3...

xattt 5y ago

Why were so many window managers dependent on DOS back then? I get the impression that developers were stuck in a paradigm that using x86 meant the use of some form of DOS as a back-end. Contrast to today, and there’s a post on HN every other week about implementing some hobby OS.

dotancohen 5y ago
Because DOS already did everything reliably and in a way that the users expect. If your window manager had any behaviour slightly different from DOS - such as using the current timestamp when copying a file - then users would notice and complain. That was a very long trail of behaviours to copy. Or just rely on DOS.
bluedino 5y ago
There were DOS clones and other operating systems back then. CP/M, DR-DOS (take a look at VIEWMAX), PC-MOS, VM/386... Part of the problem was you needed to get your OS on all the computers out there, most clone builders had agreements with Microsoft. The other was you needed DOS compatibility, or else you didn't have any software to run.
- coldacid 5y ago
  I wouldn't call CP/M and DR-DOS "clones" of MS-DOS. It's more the other way around: MS-DOS originated as a x86 clone of CP/M!
  - bluedino 5y ago
    I meant dos clones and other operating systems
simonh 5y ago
GEOS didn't really rely on DOS, it just used it as a launcher and for some basic I/O for compatibility's sake. It would have been trivial to cut loose from it, but why bother? Customers would just have worried that it wouldn't run on their 'DOS' computers.

weinzierl 5y ago

“GEOS did not pioneer the GUI; most of its features were already present in the larger OSes of the day, like the classic Mac (albeit, not Windows). What GEOS did show is that cheap, low-power, commodity hardware and simple office productivity software worked. You did not need a $2000 machine to type a simple letter and print it.” To me, GEOS was a tech demo - an incredible tech demo - but I did not, and don't know anyone, who ever used it productively. Not even to type a simple letter and print it. There were much more efficient ways to do that. My caveat is that I say this from the "cheap, low-power, commodity hardware" home computer perspective. That GEOS ran on my C64 was mind-blowing, but not particularly useful.

gilmore606 5y ago
I did! At age 14 I used it to make newsletters for my church. It was a big step up for me from Newsroom, which could only layout in a 2x3 grid -- I could finally do WYSIWYG column-flows with embedded clip art! GeOS felt like the future to me, because it was (or seemed to be) treating the screen as an arbitrary pixel grid, free from the constraints of a 40x24 char array and 8 sprites.
reaperducer 5y ago
I did not, and don't know anyone, who ever used it productively. Not even to type a simple letter and print it. There were much more efficient ways to do that. I knew an east coast limousine company that ran its whole business on it.
themadturk 5y ago
See my other comment; it was highly usable and I was productive with it creating newsletters.
svachalek 5y ago
Likewise, I used it for letters and school papers. Its time was brief but it was fully functional, not just a demo.

thanatos519 5y ago

The PC version of GeoWorks even rocked on my souped-up IBM PC 5150. The display PostScript was a perfect preview of the printouts from my 9-pin dot matrix printer.

andrew_ 5y ago

Oh man, nostalgia! That ran on our first home PC, and it was where at the age of 12 I learned what a cookie was. The days!

simonh 5y ago

And then there was GEM, the other 'other' windows. I worked for a year doing PC support for a local health authority here in the UK in 1989 and a few of the secretaries used GEM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)

InTheArena 5y ago

I loved geoworks. It would scream on my 386SX with 40mb hard disk. It was a joy to use. It taught me a valuable life lesson that I still return to. Watching a clearly superior platform be destroyed by inferior technology, but superior business savvy (and shady ethics) taught me that sometimes the better technology looses, and that life isn't fair.

akoster 5y ago

It was neat to play with in a VM using the (quasi-legal) copy from WinWorld [1] as well as its derivatives Breadbox Ensemble [2] and New Deal Office [3]. [1] https://winworldpc.com/product/geos/2x https://winworldpc.com/product/geos/2x [2] https://winworldpc.com/product/breadbox-ensemble/4 https://winworldpc.com/product/breadbox-ensemble/4 [3] https://winworldpc.com/product/new-deal-office/2000 https://winworldpc.com/product/new-deal-office/2000

pavlov 5y ago

Some interesting notes about GeoWorks' architecture in Steve Yegge's blog from 2008: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st... The whole thing was written in x86 assembly — 15 million lines! And that proved its eventual downfall. Here's the quote from the post: -- "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! "Small systems are not only easier to optimize, they're possible to optimize. And I mean globally optimize." --

5y ago

azinman2 5y ago

All of the sudden HN seems to be getting a ton of articles and Wikipedia links to all things DOS these days. Just a fervor of nostalgia?

detaro 5y ago
And people seeing one post and being remembered of other, related things, and submitting them (or mentioning them in comments and then someone else thinks they are worth submitting on their own). You often get topic clusters that way.
gorkish 5y ago
Sorry, we accidentally left you off of the #DOScember memo, but yes it's been a thing for a few years.

a-dub 5y ago

the geos version of aol was pretty brilliant for its time. prodigy technically predated it, but prodigy looked like crap (think bloomberg terminal) while early aol was all geos. i think i had a discounted early adopter "charter membership" for aol... shame it didn't come with stock.

rdp36 5y ago

I loved my HP Omnigo http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=200 http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=200 I should look for one to buy...

Damogran6 5y ago

MAN I'm glad you posted this...with OS/@ and DesqViewX posts, I kept wracking my brain trying to remember this one. It's dot-matrix 'laser quality' mode went over each line 6 times...so wasteful, so pretty.

drewzero1 5y ago

I have an HP OmniGo 100 that uses this, and it turned out as a pretty usable mobile operating system (for a 386 palmtop, at least). If I didn't know there was DOS underneath, I would've thought it was custom software like PalmOS.