GeoWorks: The Other “Windows”
tedium.co
tedium.co
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n78x5cp8na4iilq/InternetDirectIncP...
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.
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.
Of course, at the time I was simply blown away by using something that looked almost as good as a Mac, so it's possible my experience (and my memory of it) is tainted.
Ah, for those simpler days.
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.
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.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue60/175_1_GEM_A_N...
Was something I aspired to acquire, but never did.
Just running real-mode Win 3.1 in a window was a pretty awesome feat.
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.
"Related" can be used two different ways:
[1] This software is related to that software -- as in, they shared code, or a design, or something. PC GEM is related to Atari ST GEM; PC GEOS is related to C64 GEOS.
[2] software A is relevant to software B, and if one is considering A one should also know about B.
I think which is meant here is clear.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)
This was only a month after Atari was bought, and the folks from Commodore were running things without consulting us "old Atari" types (establishing trust took a few months). There were no slam dunks; every windowing system had its drawbacks. I remember reading a bunch of documentation and not being impressed by anything commercially available.
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.
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.
I knew an east coast limousine company that ran its whole business on it.
[1] https://winworldpc.com/product/geos/2x
... 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.
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.
It's mentioned here: 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-a4...
... and here: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c389727e-5fc2-bac3-bd11-c3...
Contrast to today, and there’s a post on HN every other week about implementing some hobby OS.
Or just rely on DOS.
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.
In fact, most 90's DOS software used DOS only for the FS access and maybe print spooling with every other kind of hardware being accessed directly.
Windows 3.1 had an option for "32-bit Disk Access" when running in 386 Enhanced Mode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/32-bit_disk_access
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (but not ordinary Win 3.11, nor any version of 3.1) also offered 32-bit File Access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/32-bit_file_access
So WfWg 3.11 -- and only that version -- could do 32-bit disk, filesystem and networking.
DOS did have print spooling from v2.0, via the `PRINT` command, but very few DOS apps used that. https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/print.html
DOS did not not include any form of printer drivers, making DOS printer access fairly useless to apps that could actually control the printer. DOS apps therefore mostly did their own printer control -- and spooling, if any -- so that they could use advanced features such as bold, underline, italics, small fonts or double-width fonts.
Soft fonts appeared quite late on DOS; WordPerfect was quite famous for its advanced font and printer control. Scalable fonts only really came with Windows 3.1, which drove printers in graphics mode -- slow, noisy, and with poor print quality, but it enabled WYSIWYG.
because that's all there was. sure there was crap like xenix and sco and later bsdi, and bespoke things like mwc coherent but nobody actually used any of those things really.
when i was in high school i recycled an old 386 pc from the local university and set it up with linux and ip masquerade so that a single dial-up internet connection could be shared by a whole school computer lab. some rich kid's dad somehow got to take it home and then somehow got my phone number and then called me very angrily because i wouldn't tell him how to get out of this linux thing and so he could "drop to dos."
most people didn't understand the idea of operating systems back then, dos and pcs were one and the same for most people. the idea that you could do something to your computer that would make it unable to run "pc compatible" software that you buy in boxes at the store was just utterly befuddling for the vast majority of pc users.
It's dot-matrix 'laser quality' mode went over each line 6 times...so wasteful, so pretty.
I should look for one to buy...
i think i had a discounted early adopter "charter membership" for aol... shame it didn't come with stock.
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."
--
Example: https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos/blob/master/Appl/GPCMail...
Edit. The answer is yes.