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from the Why-not-call-it-the-Open-Sea-Shell? dept.
GEOS is getting a fifth shot at life, as the 1990s DOS shell—despite the name, it is not an OS, in the strictest sense of the term—has been released as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license by new owner blueway.Softworks.
Releasing PC/GEOS as open source came with significant hurdles, considering how often the platform changed hands. “After Frank S. Fischer, the former owner and long time GEOS enthusiast passed away, I worked with Breadbox's former CTO John Howard and Frank’s wife, as the new owner, to acquire the rights to give PC/GEOS a future and a new home,” Falk Rehwagen, former Breadbox employee and owner of new rights holder blueway.Softworks, told TechRepublic. “There always was the vision to make the technology available to the community to enable further developments, make it a living and developable system.”
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-pcgeos-found-a-5th-life-as-an-open-source-dos-shell/
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:14PM
I never really could get into it. It seemed so limited, but it *did* feel like the future... a future that came too early for the hardware. It did seem to make the C64 more than it was--but at the same time, it was frustrating to me, because it didn't seem to really be what it was pretending to be with what it was showing in GEOS. Or maybe I just didn't have enough goodies along with it. I am not sure of the extent of the actual ecosystem for it, but I can tell you I still dream in AT modem commands on occasion, entered in via the various terminal emulators...my comments aren't from my lack of C64 use as a whole.)
Maybe if GEOS got a little more love in the C128 with the expanded memory to speed it up (or if the C64 had a floppy disk drive, that despite having its own dedicated CPU, was actually running at fastload speeds by default..), then maybe instead of Windows we'd have GEows or something. I am sure it could do more than what I saw, but I saw a cool potential limited by my childhood lack of money for more stuff.
(And... I mean really, if the Apple 2/e had an astounding OS success, we'd have Apploids or something by now, which sounds like a communicable toliet seat disease. Thank goodness history took a left turn and avoided that fate. I don't know if Anroid sounds any better to be honest, though...)