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Comment by crtified | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

I think that kind of explains the popularity of Arch.

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