6 ms·

GeoWorks: The Other Windows (2019)

97 points by bpierre 2y ago

navjack27 2y ago
(2019)
crtified 2y ago
In the early 90s, Geoworks Ensemble filtered through my local teenager PC scene. The more curious among us tried it out. The experience was smooth and polished enough, and just different enough, that we went back a few times. Running Geoworks for weeks at a time. But ultimately the system was relatively closed and limiting, there was nowhere to go with it once you got sick of the range it offered. From the perspective of young home enthusiasts at the time, anyway. Meanwhile DOS (and even Windows) -based development was undergoing a period of extremely rapid iterative changes and extensions. It was impossible to stay away from that for long. It's where all the action was.
- DCH3416 2y ago
  I think that kind of explains the popularity of Arch.
- crtified 2y ago
  A belated note, from a bubbled-up memory (all on an "IIRC" basis!) : Hard disk space was the killer, as much as anything. The average home PCs hard disk was 40-50MB in those days, and iirc a full Geoworks Ensemble install took almost half of it. And regardless of how one scrimped and made-do with what was left, it became an overwhelming disadvantage to have the whole system weighed down in that manner by such a heavy OS.
  - crtified 2y ago
    I can't edit the above post now (thus the folly of hastily commenting on HN, perhaps), but after actually looking into it by doing a DOSBox-X install, it seems that the Geoworks Ensemble 2.0 install size is only <10MB. I suspect that my false memories of it taking more space were because, by 1993, DOS games and programs were requiring steadily more disk space (and there were more of them!). With Geoworks taking any sizeable portion our increasingly-meagre 40-52MB disks, we soon found ourselves desperately wanting those megabytes back to install this-or-that extra thing.
- johnm 2y ago
  Yeah, it took way too long to prioritize and deliver a non-assembly development chain and opening that up to the public at large. We cross-developed from Sun workstations to x86 PCs and quality of x86 native tooling wasn't nearly as good. But eventually building on x86 was actually quite a bit faster.
wenc 2y ago
I wonder why so many of these earlier GUIs didn't seem to have gotten typography right? I remember Geoworks looking cool, but the typography was not great. Even worse were Apple Mac inspired GUIs like Digital Research's GEM Desktop. (which was the default interface in Ventura Publisher) https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x Amiga Workbench despite being ahead of its time, had poor typography https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/workbench/workbench-1-2/ https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/work... Compare that to Apple System 6 https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-0-6/system-6x https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-0-6/system-6x The only environment that came close to having decent typography (apart from Windows and OS/2) was DesqviewX but I don't know if I knew anyone who ran it. https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x
- hulitu 2y ago
  Because it is hard. Windows (10 and 11) still has problems.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  The GeoWorks typography engine was actually exceptional in that it offered fully scalable fonts (up to 792pt IIRC) when a lot of Windows fonts were still bitmapped and you had to get font cartridges for your LaserJet. The fonts look a bit different from the Microsoft and Apple ones, but they were likely sourced from a different vendor (URW?), so there's an uncanny-valley aspect to it these days when "Times" means "Times New Roman". I wonder if part of it was that when the earlier GUIs, like GEM and the Workbench, were architected before desktop publishing became the undeniable "killer app" for a GUI. They figured "here's some basic fonts to render the UI" and punted to the application software to handle anything else. Even with some of the early GUI word processors (GEM Write, for example), full WYSIWYG typography might have been above the expected target, considering the machine might be paired with a daisy-wheel or 9-pin dot-matrix printer. Of course, all typography of the era looks a little odd by modern standards, running on a 640x480 screen with no antialiasing.
  - lproven 2y ago
anothername12 2y ago
Liked this bit: > Like a cow shoved through the food manufacturing process and split into a million pieces
supportengineer 2y ago
It was miraculous what you could do with GEOS on the Commodore 64. I did a lot of school projects, such as papers and newsletters. With lots of fonts and graphics.
- genericacct 2y ago
  came here to say this... it was glimpse of the future
- mech422 2y ago
  Heh - yeah, 'paperclip' and a dot matrix printer (epson mx 80? or a commodore one?) got me thru high school :-)
- j4_hnews 2y ago
  Massive 10 foot happy birthday banners
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some previous discussion & anecdotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: GeoWorks Geos: The Other Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38961852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38961852 - Jan 2024 (4 comments) GeoWorks: The Other “Windows” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609 - Dec 2021 (66 comments) Geoworks and AOL (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27275321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27275321 - May 2021 (6 comments) The History of GeoWorks, Microsoft Windows’ Upstart ’90s Competitor (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748209 - July 2017 (64 comments)
lproven 2y ago
PC GEOS is now Apache 2 FOSS. https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos
wvenable 2y ago
PC GEOS had no future because it was written in object-oriented 8086 assembly language. This made it very small and efficient but effectively tied it to that 16bit platform. When PCs moved to 32bit and protected mode with the 386 there was no hope for GEOS. It continued to find a niche in handheld PDAs running x86 processors (I had one, the HP OmniGo) but even those types of computers eventually moved to 32bit ARM.
- wolfgang42 2y ago
  >assembly language... made it very small and efficient There’s an interesting post from someone who worked on the codebase and argues the opposite[1]—some relevant quotes: > 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? > [...] 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! [1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-s... Discussed at the time (34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187365 and in 2023 (45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36571956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36571956
  - wvenable 2y ago
    I was being charitable.
  - ebcode 2y ago
    That is a great talk by Steve Yegge. And now I know why he's angry all the time. Not only did he work on GeoWorks, he also tried using Ruby at Google! Absolute legend. Here's the video of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-Bb-D6teE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-Bb-D6teE
russellbeattie 2y ago
I used GeoWorks on my used IBM PS/2 286 PC in like 1992. It ran off a single AOL floppy. It was honestly amazing to see my "ancient" DOS based computer suddenly displaying a Windows-like GUI. It really seemed like magic. It was also pretty much the only time I used a mouse on that machine, since everything else was DOS.
trhway 2y ago
>But the best part of GeoWorks was the fact that it worked well without really strong hardware. Windows 3.1 really needed a 486 to shine, but GeoWorks could effectively run on a 286 or 386 without any problem. My first install of Slackware 30 years ago was on 386DX33 with 2M RAM. The X felt fast and responsive, especially compare to the Windows. The only thing i saw missing then in Linux preventing me from pushing it to our customers is that typical business software of the day didn't work on it. Well, several years later, like Oracle release in 98, the things changed, and that seems to have sealed the fate of the high-tech world for the foreseeable future.
- johnm 2y ago
  PC/GEOS v1.0 ran on an original IBM PC with 640K. The minimum for v1.2 was 1MB of RAM. In terms of responsiveness, it was an interesting compare and contrast from the Sun workstations vs. the PCs running GEOS. Less mouse jitter is one memory (especially in comparison to those old Ultrix machines).
snozolli 2y ago
I distinctly remember a PC magazine article about a later release of GeoWorks. It gushed about how it could play full motion video (probably only 256 pixels wide, if that) while running other applications. The screenshot showed a clip from Star Trek IV. Kind of laughable by modern standards, but it was an impressive technical feat at the time.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Maybe that was about Tron OS? I remember an article on that around that time which specifically mentioned it playing video --- on an 80186. Difference of course, is Tron is still around and is one of the most installed/used OSs in existence.
pjmlp 2y ago
Philips used to ship GeoWorks on their PCs back in the early 1990's, at least in what concerns their products being sold in Portugal. A mate used to talk how much better using GeoWorks than us stuck on Amigas and PCs with Windows 3.x...
- hakfoo 2y ago
  Also in the US. My family's first PC was a Magnavox-branded 386SX. Weirdly overengineered (motherboard with a lot of SMD components, almost tool-free case, CPU on a card so it could be sold as a 286 or 386SX) but janky in other ways (1M RAM/40M disc) In retrospect it sort of made sense: Philips was an electronics company making a nice piece of electronics, rather than a computer company that was chasing benchmarks and features.

97 points by bpierre 2y ago

(2019)

In the early 90s, Geoworks Ensemble filtered through my local teenager PC scene. The more curious among us tried it out. The experience was smooth and polished enough, and just different enough, that we went back a few times. Running Geoworks for weeks at a time. But ultimately the system was relatively closed and limiting, there was nowhere to go with it once you got sick of the range it offered. From the perspective of young home enthusiasts at the time, anyway. Meanwhile DOS (and even Windows) -based development was undergoing a period of extremely rapid iterative changes and extensions. It was impossible to stay away from that for long. It's where all the action was.

DCH3416 2y ago
I think that kind of explains the popularity of Arch.
crtified 2y ago
A belated note, from a bubbled-up memory (all on an "IIRC" basis!) : Hard disk space was the killer, as much as anything. The average home PCs hard disk was 40-50MB in those days, and iirc a full Geoworks Ensemble install took almost half of it. And regardless of how one scrimped and made-do with what was left, it became an overwhelming disadvantage to have the whole system weighed down in that manner by such a heavy OS.
- crtified 2y ago
  I can't edit the above post now (thus the folly of hastily commenting on HN, perhaps), but after actually looking into it by doing a DOSBox-X install, it seems that the Geoworks Ensemble 2.0 install size is only <10MB. I suspect that my false memories of it taking more space were because, by 1993, DOS games and programs were requiring steadily more disk space (and there were more of them!). With Geoworks taking any sizeable portion our increasingly-meagre 40-52MB disks, we soon found ourselves desperately wanting those megabytes back to install this-or-that extra thing.
johnm 2y ago
Yeah, it took way too long to prioritize and deliver a non-assembly development chain and opening that up to the public at large. We cross-developed from Sun workstations to x86 PCs and quality of x86 native tooling wasn't nearly as good. But eventually building on x86 was actually quite a bit faster.

wenc 2y ago

I wonder why so many of these earlier GUIs didn't seem to have gotten typography right? I remember Geoworks looking cool, but the typography was not great. Even worse were Apple Mac inspired GUIs like Digital Research's GEM Desktop. (which was the default interface in Ventura Publisher) https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x Amiga Workbench despite being ahead of its time, had poor typography https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/workbench/workbench-1-2/ https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/work... Compare that to Apple System 6 https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-0-6/system-6x https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-0-6/system-6x The only environment that came close to having decent typography (apart from Windows and OS/2) was DesqviewX but I don't know if I knew anyone who ran it. https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x

hulitu 2y ago
Because it is hard. Windows (10 and 11) still has problems.
hakfoo 2y ago
The GeoWorks typography engine was actually exceptional in that it offered fully scalable fonts (up to 792pt IIRC) when a lot of Windows fonts were still bitmapped and you had to get font cartridges for your LaserJet. The fonts look a bit different from the Microsoft and Apple ones, but they were likely sourced from a different vendor (URW?), so there's an uncanny-valley aspect to it these days when "Times" means "Times New Roman". I wonder if part of it was that when the earlier GUIs, like GEM and the Workbench, were architected before desktop publishing became the undeniable "killer app" for a GUI. They figured "here's some basic fonts to render the UI" and punted to the application software to handle anything else. Even with some of the early GUI word processors (GEM Write, for example), full WYSIWYG typography might have been above the expected target, considering the machine might be paired with a daisy-wheel or 9-pin dot-matrix printer. Of course, all typography of the era looks a little odd by modern standards, running on a 640x480 screen with no antialiasing.
- lproven 2y ago

anothername12 2y ago

Liked this bit: > Like a cow shoved through the food manufacturing process and split into a million pieces

supportengineer 2y ago

It was miraculous what you could do with GEOS on the Commodore 64. I did a lot of school projects, such as papers and newsletters. With lots of fonts and graphics.

genericacct 2y ago
came here to say this... it was glimpse of the future
mech422 2y ago
Heh - yeah, 'paperclip' and a dot matrix printer (epson mx 80? or a commodore one?) got me thru high school :-)
j4_hnews 2y ago
Massive 10 foot happy birthday banners

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Some previous discussion & anecdotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: GeoWorks Geos: The Other Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38961852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38961852 - Jan 2024 (4 comments) GeoWorks: The Other “Windows” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609 - Dec 2021 (66 comments) Geoworks and AOL (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27275321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27275321 - May 2021 (6 comments) The History of GeoWorks, Microsoft Windows’ Upstart ’90s Competitor (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748209 - July 2017 (64 comments)

lproven 2y ago

PC GEOS is now Apache 2 FOSS. https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

wvenable 2y ago

PC GEOS had no future because it was written in object-oriented 8086 assembly language. This made it very small and efficient but effectively tied it to that 16bit platform. When PCs moved to 32bit and protected mode with the 386 there was no hope for GEOS. It continued to find a niche in handheld PDAs running x86 processors (I had one, the HP OmniGo) but even those types of computers eventually moved to 32bit ARM.

wolfgang42 2y ago
>assembly language... made it very small and efficient There’s an interesting post from someone who worked on the codebase and argues the opposite[1]—some relevant quotes: > 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? > [...] 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! [1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-s... Discussed at the time (34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187365 and in 2023 (45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36571956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36571956
- wvenable 2y ago
  I was being charitable.
- ebcode 2y ago
  That is a great talk by Steve Yegge. And now I know why he's angry all the time. Not only did he work on GeoWorks, he also tried using Ruby at Google! Absolute legend. Here's the video of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-Bb-D6teE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-Bb-D6teE

russellbeattie 2y ago

I used GeoWorks on my used IBM PS/2 286 PC in like 1992. It ran off a single AOL floppy. It was honestly amazing to see my "ancient" DOS based computer suddenly displaying a Windows-like GUI. It really seemed like magic. It was also pretty much the only time I used a mouse on that machine, since everything else was DOS.

trhway 2y ago

>But the best part of GeoWorks was the fact that it worked well without really strong hardware. Windows 3.1 really needed a 486 to shine, but GeoWorks could effectively run on a 286 or 386 without any problem. My first install of Slackware 30 years ago was on 386DX33 with 2M RAM. The X felt fast and responsive, especially compare to the Windows. The only thing i saw missing then in Linux preventing me from pushing it to our customers is that typical business software of the day didn't work on it. Well, several years later, like Oracle release in 98, the things changed, and that seems to have sealed the fate of the high-tech world for the foreseeable future.

johnm 2y ago
PC/GEOS v1.0 ran on an original IBM PC with 640K. The minimum for v1.2 was 1MB of RAM. In terms of responsiveness, it was an interesting compare and contrast from the Sun workstations vs. the PCs running GEOS. Less mouse jitter is one memory (especially in comparison to those old Ultrix machines).

snozolli 2y ago

I distinctly remember a PC magazine article about a later release of GeoWorks. It gushed about how it could play full motion video (probably only 256 pixels wide, if that) while running other applications. The screenshot showed a clip from Star Trek IV. Kind of laughable by modern standards, but it was an impressive technical feat at the time.

WillAdams 2y ago
Maybe that was about Tron OS? I remember an article on that around that time which specifically mentioned it playing video --- on an 80186. Difference of course, is Tron is still around and is one of the most installed/used OSs in existence.

pjmlp 2y ago

Philips used to ship GeoWorks on their PCs back in the early 1990's, at least in what concerns their products being sold in Portugal. A mate used to talk how much better using GeoWorks than us stuck on Amigas and PCs with Windows 3.x...

hakfoo 2y ago
Also in the US. My family's first PC was a Magnavox-branded 386SX. Weirdly overengineered (motherboard with a lot of SMD components, almost tool-free case, CPU on a card so it could be sold as a 286 or 386SX) but janky in other ways (1M RAM/40M disc) In retrospect it sort of made sense: Philips was an electronics company making a nice piece of electronics, rather than a computer company that was chasing benchmarks and features.