Geoworks and AOL (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Geoworks and AOL (2019)

tedium.co

17 pointsTorwald6 comments

I really loved the Motif look and the fluid UI. Didn't like so much the lack of a keyboard layout I could use to write in Portuguese and the not great video drivers (it insisted on keeping me on 800x600 and 16 colors).

An important lesson is to make application development (for dull corporate apps) easy. In Brazil, Windows adoption soared when VB3 was introduced, as it displaced Nantucket's Clipper as the desktop app language of choice.

It's interesting to note that there's a legal morass surrounding Geoworks keeping it from becoming fully open-source or more widespread use. It reminds me of the recent discussions of similar wrangling with the Amiga OS.

It's funny how we're stuck with a MacOS that's becoming more and more iOS like, Windows which is, well, windows, and a linux that's increasingly become a linux layer for SystemD OS but if you want to look at something simpler there's always a legal claim and people who can keep the property in limbo who are going to get one more drop of blood from the turnip...

The speed of it on the low end machines was not good even though it was advertised as speedy.

It _worked_ on 286 machines but it was slow to use. Kind of annoying to use but so was Windows 3.0 on the same machines. I remember selling the idea of faster UI to our school's IT guy and it was used until the the already old then machines were put of use.

So maybe it was success but it didn't feel like it...

I seem to remember using it as a daily driver on an 8mhz 8086 panasonic with 1MB of ram and a 40MB HD and it was usable to me. This was obviously a long time ago so my memory could be faulty.

Why did it require a sun workstation to develop for it? The C compiler and libraries? I'd be interested to know about the development environment.

It's been a long time since I worked at Geoworks and my memory is a bit fuzzy. The tool chain was highly proprietary object oriented assembly. The builds were all distributed for speed. The tools were all developed on sun workstations. There was a strong pivot to tablets (inspired by apple newton) and smartphones by the time I joined. Eventually a toolchain around an object oriented extension to C was developed and I don't believe that required a sun workstation, but I don't remember the details.

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