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: 3, Informative) by EEMac on Friday March 15 2019, @09:45PM (2 children)
GEOS was great on my Commodore 64. And now it's finally out in the world again. HOORAY!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @10:33PM
'member Quantum Link & Club Caribe?
(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...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @10:36PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system) [wikipedia.org]
I wonder if the sucker run on FreeDOS?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:47AM (1 child)
Well, I guess you could put it the way you did in your subject line, but that's how everything was back then. DOS was your operating system. Anything with a GUI ran on top of DOS, including all versions of Windows before 95. (Well, Windows 95 was a bit of a hackjob in that respect, but nevermind that for now.)
Point is: yes there were alternative GUIs for those who were inclined toward the mouse in the early days, including GEOS, which was a heck of a lot better than the earliest versions of Windows.
But I do find it a bit amusing to call something a "sorta GUI for DOS," as if DOS needed a GUI to be useful, or alternatively that someone went out of their way to make a GUI for DOS. It was just a GUI, which wasn't yet standard in those days. Most people just were used to working with command-line tools and applications that required keyboard-based commands, menus, and navigation in their interfaces.
The mouse and GUI was often a step backwards in efficiency, though it increased transparency and usability for newer users.
(It always feels ironic that the next evolution in that regard -- touch screens -- has widely resulted in LACK of transparency. Instead of memorizing an arcane list of keyboard shortcuts as people had to do in the pre-mouse era to avoid lots of scrolling through menus and help, nowadays one has to memorize loads of arcane "pull down from top, then two-finger swipe, followed by double-tap on ambiguous pictogram" with often no clear help or instructions to find said gesture combinations or figure out what the pictograms mean. In an era where getting info about and through the interface should be easiest, it often feels completely opaque.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @09:49AM
Yeah, I know. I used MS-DOS 3 and newer.
Also find it ridiculous how many GNU/Linux users are scared shitless of the terminal. Probably people who've been pushing mouse all their lives and know nothing else. Some things are easier poking around with a mouse and some things easier on the CLI.
And touch devices are a horror show, don't own one and not planning to get one either.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday March 15 2019, @11:10PM
I had an autoexec.bat and config.sys for 2-3 games, plus one for work (yeah, I worked from home fairly often in the 80s). The work one just made a big ramdisk, copied the source code from floppies to the ramdisk, and my makefile copied files back to the disk after a successful compilation.
I hate to think of how many hours I put into crafting each of those configurations. I wouldn't have the patience for it now.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bmimatt on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:17AM
I wouldn't want touch that useless piece of crap with a 6 ft pole. Even for strictly archeological reasons. Gave me enough grief back in the day.
(Score: 4, Informative) by SomeGuy on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:42AM
It was a bit more than just a DOS shell or GUI. It was a multi-tasking application environment. The ensemble versions also included a complete office suite. In 1990/91 it was bit more advanced than Windows 3.0 or competitors like Tandy Deskmate. Since it did run on top of DOS it was much less of a hassle than that new fangled OS/2 1.x. It ran quite well on a 286. If you got floppy disks with a DOS-based AOL client, that used PC/GEOS as the runtime.
For the longest time, it was sold as an office environment for older computers. It was revamped and given a Windows 95-like user interface as Newdeal/Breadbox ensemble. Perfect fit for an underpowered 486 or Pentium. It even worked with VESA vga modes.
It never really got a lot of third party applications, though. And early versions did have timing bugs that caused it to barf on faster CPUs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:57AM
I bought GeoWorks instead of Windows for my 386 back in the day. The evil empire won out in the long run, but I don't regret the purchase; it was easily superior to Windows. I still miss it over current OSes for one big reason: the UI wasn't the fugly flat mess we're stuck with today.
I've still got my GeoWorks and GeoWorks Pro manuals and disks and would love to fire it up in a VM, but the hardware, even virtual, is too advanced. If somebody gets this FreeGeoWorks up and running, I'll definitely take a look at it.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:59PM
Being a Mac (and still Apple IIgs) guy back even in those days, I got to tinker with (the mentioned PC version) it a bit and was impressed. It was a bit dull in appearance (much like Motif), but incredibly fast. The most impressive thing I remember was their font scaling technology, "Nimbus", which at that time seemed a class above what ATM (Adobe Type Manager, the vector scaling bolt-on before TrueType came along) did on the Mac. Everything MS back in those days was complete junk, so it wasn't even a comparison.
But I also remember the impression that they clung onto the SDK like Gollum on the ring ("hr, hr, my precious") and low-threshold entry into developing for it was impossible. So they never got what's called an "ecosystem" now and failed soon.
I definitely look forward to that release, and it might, in certain embedded applications, even have its place today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:29PM
This is rather for educational purposes - it's probably not easy to build a working software from it. And there's a small confusion with versioning: The "marketing" name was like 4.1.x, not 4.1x which was a bit more internal designation. So 4.13 is usually described as 4.1.3.
Anyone tried to build this? I found a few things missing, sometimes there are apps in asm right off the bat, but it doesn't look like typically generated, but written.
Any info which version of Watcom I need to have to build it (V2??? Watcom V. 2 is like 1980s, probably not even for PCs, this source is much newer)?
Finally, when you chew through higher level code, you find some parts, well, just missing. This is not a problem when there's a document containing information what was not included. There was the same situation with OpenGEM and was fixed as it was clearly known what needs to be added.
(Score: 2) by aim on Monday March 18 2019, @09:00AM
While I do remember GEOS / GeoWorks Ensemble from C64 times (a friend of mine had one of those), I better recall GEM - which many of you will know from the Atari ST.
Back in 2014, when I bought a laptop w/o OS, I was surprised to find it came with FreeDOS and OpenGEM [wikipedia.org] preinstalled for testing the hardware (and maybe to avoid hassle with MS). The combination was extremely fast and, especially compared to the installs I made thereafter, showed how current hardware gets slowed by modern OSs - even if those offer many more features. It sure was a nice trip down memory lane.