What makes it great in 2018? Why keep alive?
It might be useful as the basis of a new mobile-phone operating system.
It is certainly interesting to the archaic-computer users out there who are maintaining old systems as a means of consolidating computing culture, as we lean more and more towards homogenisation ...
Similarly, there’s nothing about geos that’s appropriate for a mobile device. If you want to start with something existing, Android is already open source and has a ton of existing software. Or try fuschia if you want more bleeding edge.
Now if you say it’s for a hobby, or fun, or whatever then I can understand.
The allure of using an old operating system as the basis for new work is that it would at least seem to be much simpler than a modern operating system; and it's a good thing to avoid unnecessary complexity. Of course, it may turn out that in order to work on a modern computer, you need most of the complexity.
Something that's reported to work well on a 386 should be likely to feel responsive and fluid on any modern computer.
It's not as simple as comparing it to the paradigm used by other operating platforms.
I have an Android ADP1 phone on my desk at work; the first Android phone which was ever released (the G1 with the custom paint job on the back). It's a paperweight; there's nothing useful I can do with it, and it won't even talk to the Google servers any more. However, obsolete as it is, it's still staggeringly more powerful than anything GEOS ever ran on.
The biggest thing systems like GEOS do for the modern developer is to be an example: to demonstrate just what you can do with a tiny, tiny amount of code.
(Oh yeah, GEOS also had virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.)
To get a pointer, there were additional calls that would enable blocks (identified by handle) to be locked and unlocked. The lock calls provided pointers that were deemed valid until the block was unlocked.
The net of this is that the OS could do things like relocate and page blocks that weren't locked, and do it without hardware assistance.
It really was a nice, minimalistic way to approximate some 'big iron' features on modest hardware. (Although it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to go back. :-) )
Let's not get carried away... I remember running Linux on machines as small as 4MB.... not to mention embedded versions that were materially smaller still.
While it's true that PC/GEOS was small and efficient, it's also a product of its time (early 90's), as well as the fact it basically didn't follow any backwards compatibility constraints.
> demonstrate just what you can do with a tiny, tiny amount of code.... Oh yeah, GEOS also had virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.)
My first professional software job involved writing software on a custom OS that had at least the preemptive multitasking in four C source files. (Handle based VM would've been an easy addition.) It was also portable across X86 real and protected modes, and MC68K...
Honestly, PC/GEOS would have been even better suited to task. Less resource intensive, but still with decent WYSIWYG tools. I may have to put together a bootable device with FreeDOS and GEOS this weekend.
Nothing wrong just-for-fun projects, of course. I loved GEOS on the C64, and it tickles me that someone's still maintaining it.
HN is also an experiment of community building. As far as I am concerned, the downvotes for the parent are a sign that the experiment is moving torwards fail.
If you are insecure as to when it is appropriate to downvote on HN, please read the ruleset again. Thanks.
There is only one written-down rule about downvotes, and your comment is breaking it.
We periodically get people on HN sneering at neat toy projects because they don't fill a business need, and we don't like that.