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PC GEOS: the multitasking DOS-based GUI OS that evolved from a C64 desktop
- GeekyBear 3y agoGEOS was an impressive example of accomplishing much despite extremely constrained resources.
- andrepd 3y agoAnd now we have impressive examples of accomplishing so little despite extremely abundant resources :)
- golem14 3y agoI also really like GEM (for the PC and Atari ST). It's nice to imagine Gem would have replaced windows in some alternate reality and then imagine where that would have taken us. Probably to a similar place, given the forces on the industry ... I'm still longing (irrationally) for the simplicity of GEM on the monochrome Atari ST monitor...
- orionblastar 3y agoDon't forget GEM: https://www.owenrudge.net/GEM/dist https://www.owenrudge.net/GEM/dist
- OnlyMortal 3y agoThe Atari version was pretty neat - especially when compared to the Amiga of the day. It looked quite a lot like the Mac though the underlying API was nothing like the Mac. The DOS version was dreadful. Source: Amiga then Mac owner
- golem14 3y agoProgramming for GEM seemed so much easier than Windows, too. One or two fairly small books did the trick.
- lproven 3y ago> The DOS version was dreadful. Not at first, and not later. Apple sued DR and won, and DR had to cripple PC GEM. No overlapping windows, no icons on the desktop, drop-down menus instead of pull-down, and much more. When it went GPL, all the removed functionality was put back, plus most of the stuff from the vendor-specific runtime-only versions 4 and 5. IMHO it looked great: https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/freegem2.html https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/freegem2.html Also, some of the GPL code went into EmuTOS, an all-FOSS TOS+GEM, so it wasn't wasted or lost.
- ptek 3y agoAmiga owner here too, I would have brought a Atari ST for 1985-1987, then got the A500 in 1987. My parents brought the family a Amiga 500 in 1990
- orionblastar 3y agoI got the Amiga 1000 in 1985. I never did get into the Atari ST but I had friends who did. The next computer after the Amiga was a 386DX PC clone with VGA and a sound card.
- joneholland 3y agoMany good memories using geo works ensemble in the early 90s.
- kickingvegas 3y agoGeoWorks Ensemble had the best Motif UX even though it wasn’t built with Motif.
- supportengineer 3y agoI used GEOS on the C64, it was, and still is an astounding programming accomplishment.
- api 3y agoIt puts into perspective just what a spectacular amount of bloat we have in modern software. A lot of it comes from diversity though. GEOS was a tightly coupled system with one design, API, and programming paradigm. Same goes with classic macOS and other old school desktops. You had no more than two or three languages in use (usually ASM, C, and something like Pascal), one GUI library, one set of runtime libraries, etc. Today your typical desktop hosts apps written in dozens of languages using dozens of graphics libraries and rendering layers. Since different apps use different versions of these things each app often ships the entire stack with it, meaning you may be running three or four versions of a dozen things. To make all that interoperable requires a Byzantine mess of APIs and interfaces and across the whole system. There are tons of shims and hacks and duplication of effort. I remember a silent paradigm shift happening in the 2000s when we abandoned the question of what the “best” language or OS was and instead concluded “we’ll just run everything all at once.” So now we need 16 gigabytes of RAM for a desktop. I wonder sometimes if AI could get us out of this mess. Could future much more powerful coding models do things like reimplement the entire desktop environment in our language of choice at our command? Could they consolidate and refactor code at industrial scale? The thing that makes it impossible to get rid of all this cruft is the cost of doing so, something automation could cut.
- shortrounddev2 3y agoAny pics?
- lproven 3y ago[Submitter here] Sure. They are trivially Googled -- if you know that this poor product was renamed multiple times. GeoWorks 2.0: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/gwe2 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/gwe2 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c28fc2a9-e280-ba01-2d6c-11c3a4e284a2 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c28fc2a9-e280-ba01-2d6c-11... BreadBox Ensemble Lite 4.0: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/bbel4 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/bbel4 BreadBox Ensemble full (not Lite) version: http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html
- HeckFeck 3y agoIs this the original GEOS source code or a reimplementation?
- dfawcus 3y agoThe original source, and previous commercial docs.
- lproven 3y ago[Submitter here] The original version, now FOSS: the PC port/rewrite of the C64 original.
- HeckFeck 3y agoVery cool indeed. I'll have to play with it on my Pentium 1 box! And I wish more software of this vintage would get the source unveiling treatment...
- smallstepforman 3y agoThe documentation and code clarity for older assembly projects is by a magnitude more pleasant than any modern source I’ve looked at during the last 20 years. We should be ashamed of what we’ve done in our profession.
- WillAdams 3y agoMy favourite word processor remains WriteNow --- which was ~100,000 lines of assembly.
- chipotle_coyote 3y agoMan, I'd forgotten about WriteNow. It was my favorite word processor on the Mac for years. (I'm pretty sure at one point -- long after it was defunct -- I acquired a copy of the very last released version, which crazily enough was published by WordStar.)
- Doctor_Fegg 3y agoSimilarly, it still tickles me that LibreOffice evolved from a word-processor for the Amstrad CPC. LibreOffice < OpenOffice < StarOffice < StarWriter https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Star-Writer https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Star-Writer
- scionthefly 3y agoSomewhere I still have the StarOffice CD/s that I received (bought?) when it was a SUN microsystems product in the...maybe very early 2000s. And now I use LibreOffice...so, fairly successful software.
- dep_b 3y agoI think I still have it somewhere in a box
- erwincoumans 3y agoSome screenshot would make sense, at least in the readme.md on github. I recall GEOS on Commodore 64, 2 1541 floppy disks (speeddos?) it was a miracle, all running in 64kB: GUI, editor, calculator and other apps. Nowadays single static images are much larger than 64kB (at higher resolution though).
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 3y agoThere are plenty of screenshots here: http://toastytech.com/guis/indexgeos.html http://toastytech.com/guis/indexgeos.html (Breadbox Ensemble is the most recent version)
- zx8080 3y agoCool! Is it a coincidence that it resembles OS/2 Warp?
- Narishma 3y agoIt looks more like Windows 95 to me.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoWow, it looks incredible.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- whoopdedo 3y agoAOL became popular alongside the growth of Windows so most people think of them together. But they supported DOS-only customers with a GeoWorks client. The irony of GEOS is that it was known for having low hardware requirements to run, but software development for it was done on Sun workstations. There wasn't a DOS SDK until well after Windows had won the desktop. [*] https://tedium.co/2019/06/20/geoworks-geos-history/ https://tedium.co/2019/06/20/geoworks-geos-history/
- joezydeco 3y agoI actually used that DOS version back in the day. It was a fast tight application. It's a shame GEOS never went anywhere.
- bluedino 3y agoI had tried Windows on my 386 and it was slow as dirt compared to the AOL DOS version. I always wondered why it was so fast.
- ptek 3y agoI wonder why they didn't dogfood and release a DOS SDK it earlier?
- layer8 3y agoSome screenshots and information about the original here: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/GEOS https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/GEOS
- WillAdams 3y agoFor an explanation/backstory on this see: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-pcgeos-found-a-5th-life-as-an-open-source-dos-shell/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-pcgeos-found-a-5th-... I _really_ wish someone would port this to the Raspberry Pi.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoSort of happened in 2020: https://blog.bluewaysw.de/ensemble-on-raspberry-pi-with-ethernet-support https://blog.bluewaysw.de/ensemble-on-raspberry-pi-with-ethe...
- WillAdams 3y agoIdeally a port would not have the performance hit of emulation in DOSbox. To turn this around --- what would be the most affordable new computer this could be run on? If it could be run on a modern tablet w/ a stylus and handwriting recognition, I know what my next computer will be.
- ipaddr 3y agoWill the c64 version ever be ooen sourced or released?
- ruk_booze 3y agoIt has been reverse engineered https://github.com/mist64/geos https://github.com/mist64/geos
- jnaina 3y agoAwesome software. For a while, had my then secretary use GEOS because early Windows was bloated.
- semireg 3y agoI grew up with a C64 when I was 5-6 years old. My “uncle” cracked games under the alias “THE SHADOW” and sent me boxes of 5-1/4 disks. When I was 7 and bored one summer I went digging in our basement boxes and found a disk organizer full of “business” software. When I got GEOS running I remember becoming so upset with my parents that they “hid” this from me. To me, GEOS made my toy a “real” computer. I played with GEOS all summer. Such good memories.
- sedatk 3y agoThere are 9 "The Shadow"s on CSDB. Could your uncle be one of them? https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=3324 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=3324 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=9467 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=9467 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=26172 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=26172 (cracker) https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=26838 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=26838 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=27327 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=27327 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=31327 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=31327 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=33379 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=33379 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=36183 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=36183 (cracker) https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=38598 https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=38598
- deus_pater 3y agoI very proudly ran Geoworks on DR DOS on my 486, just to avoid Microsoft as much as possible. It ran really well! But eventually I got lured in by OS/2.
- thanatos519 3y agoThis made my IBM 5150 like a new computer! The display and print postscript gave full wysiwyg and the output to my 9 pin dot matrix printer was second to none. Windows on a 386 was a step down in many ways.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoMonochrome or CGA?
- anta40 3y agoHmm it requires OpenWatcom, eh? Perhaps I need to setup a Windows PC again.
- krylon 3y agoOpenWatcom also runs on Linux and DOS. And maybe OS/2, at least it used to at some point. I recall it supported cross-compilation, too.
- fzeindl 3y agoGeos was Genius. It had word processing, drawing, spreadsheets, games, an entire office suite. And it was programmed in a completely object oriented way so that it would suspend everything to disk. You started the PC and all your applications, windows and documents were open like before, something that macOS only achieved 20 years later.
- mseepgood 3y agoCan anybody explain to me where the meat of the application code is? For example, when I look at GeoDraw under Appl/GeoDraw I see .def files containing definitions, declarative looking .ui files in the UI subdirectory and some .asm files containing only a few very short functions. That surely can't be everything? I remember it being quite a complex application.
- dezgeg 3y agoIt seems to be in several files, e.g. UI/uiDrawApplication.asm is 1000 lines of asm