This is a very interesting user interface that differs from most because it actually has three different user interface modes each designed for a different level of user: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced.
The beginner mode starts off with a group of buttons listing all available application programs. Clicking on a button opens the application in full screen. There are no drop-down menus in the "Beginner" applications.
The applications that produce documents always open to the same document each time and do not allow opening a different one.
What ultimately killed it was the lack of a good SDK. No one developed for it, so the only apps available were pretty much what cam. Re:lemme see if i remember What was that ,8,1 all about anyways? I remember you had to type it to load certain programs but I never knew the reason. You're correct on the ",8" part. As for the ",1", well, it went like this. The first two bytes of every standard file that was designed to be loaded using kernel routines whether it be from the BASIC LOAD command, or through the actual kernel routines were the load address.
Anyway, to make a long story short, that ",1" told the load routines to load the file into the memory space pointed to by those first two bytes. Actually, the autoloading was usually done by machine language programs. As part of that program you would actually save a copy of the vectors, and set the load address of your executable to be that of the vectors. When your program loaded, you overwrote the vectors, and one of them controlled where program execution went after a load.
It's been a long time since I've done that, so the exact details in my mind are hazy. But that's how some of the simple autoloaders were done. I remember using a joystick to navigate the UI, since mice were a bit of a rarity.
Plus, GeoWrite actually had fonts to choose from, and they looked great on the trusty old dot-matrix or 'impact printer', if you will Re:ah, the oldskool memories Score: 4 , Funny. Not only did GEOS have fonts, it was possible to overload the system memory and crash the computer, forcing a reboot if you tried to load too many of them at once. Man, those were the days. Heehee I remember that!
Then we got the boxy Commodore mouse! Got me through school assignments fine. I wonder if you could put together an indestructable 'laptop', with a screen, a keyboard, and about a thimblefull of 'hardware' to run it on. Tweak it to support file transfer via USB.
Kind of like the Newton-based eMac, or Alphasmart's Dana. It's a perfectly functional OS and the footprint doesn't get lower than that. Emulator Score: 5 , Interesting. Can someone post instructions on how to get this set up with an emulator like CCS64? We don't want to have to wade through that ten page explanation on how to use a real C64, copying around floppies, etc. Re:Emulator Score: 5 , Informative. I haven't done this yet, but I would imagine that you could create. D64 files disk images , and use them.
However, it's hard to say whether or not this would work with an emulator or not. Re:Emulator Score: 4 , Interesting. Yes, they make that claim.
However, I have tried some programs in the past that did not work, because they used fastloaders. The Commodore drives have five wires on the serial port I think. Of those, I think only two of them could send data. This of course, was extremely slow, so somebody came up with a solution: send data over both lines, but make sure that the code on both sides was running at almost exactly the same speed.
So, the drive would break down the byte into bits, and send two bits at a time when using the fastloader. The C64 would receive the two bits and reassemble them into the byte.
But, since the CLK line was being used for data, the timing had to be precise, otherwise you'd miss bits. Also, because sprites would mess up the CPU cycles, they had to be disabled, as did any funky IRQs which normally there weren't any running , or you'd have problems with the data. Most fastloaders just blanked the screen, which took care of this. Apple II Version was released 6 months ago. The Apple II version was released 6 months ago. Brings back memories Score: 2.
It ran very well considering the hardware it was running on. You see color screenshots on the site, but it really had to do all that with 2 color tiles. It had a wysiwyg document editor. It was even able to load normal programs and then restore itself when the program exited. The cost GEOS v1. The paintbrush in particular gave me hours of entertainment, and there were some nifty fonts as well.
Annoying, however was the fact that the boot disk could not be copied by any conventional means, thanks to error track copy protection. Looks like And after only 80 replies, too. That's what you get when you actually host a website on a C64 running Contiki Re:Looks like Score: 4 , Insightful.
It's an interesting reminder of just how far computers have come. We sure take for the current systems for granted. Score: 3 , Insightful. The joys of going from 40 column to 80 column terminals, punter to xmodem, to ymodem to zmodem. Real Ansi with reverse and blink! First long distance phone bill and parents whipping my ass. Then Powerpacking workbench floppies and using the ram disk, when you had more memor.
I could never get the web browser to work. I think the evaluation version was crippled or was missing files , nonetheless.
Re:new deal office Score: 4 , Informative. Yes, New Deal went out of business. About 3 years ago cash was running low, and they signed a contract to get funding from investors. However, the money never showed up, so the company went under. The last version to be officially released was a bit of a pain to get on the internet, as it didn't have a dialler application, and the ethernet support didn't work on a lot of networks.
The next release had those issues fixed, but the company ran out of money right before going into production. Geoworks ahead of the curve Score: 5 , Funny. Geoworks was certainly an early pioneer in one area: unimaginative name conventions for its apps. Looking at the screenshots page, every damn app is geoThis, or geoThat. Pron looked crap Score: 2. Talk about bad for your eyes.
It's a wonder we of a certain age can see at all. Not So Nostalgia Score: 5 , Interesting. You know I still have a c Good got that out of the way. I noticed that there are still Demo groups out there, specialy in Europe. I must say I'm still impressed as to what these programmers can do on a little 8-bit CPU. It think it's true are and skill to pack so much "entertainment" into a small amount of memory. Just because the CPU might be so many years old, but it can still do so much.
Proof I think at the fact that technology may be increasing so fast that we don't use it to its fullest potential. What kind of crack were the disk drive engineerings smoking? Did they even have crack back then? The was a somewhat self-destructing device. It's supposed to be bit as I can tell reading the name c Otherwise, why is it c64?
DesqView Score: 5 , Interesting. As long as we're re-releasing old software, is it too much to ask for a copy of DesqView ? Re:DesqView Score: 3 , Interesting. Oh, good 'ol DesqView, a legend in its lunchtime. This was just around the time that Windows 3.
Copy Protection Score: 4 , Interesting. Those were the days Geoworks Ensemble? What's with Geoworks Ensemble? It used to be a fine piece of GUIware, too Don't forget Xerox Star in Score: 3 , Interesting. Ran on beefier hardware too. Neat stuff, I wonder if a Xerox Star emulator would ever be possible? I was one of the beta testers. Not exactly. Q-Link ran native on the C Echoes of the past..
Suddenly, I feel so old and jaded. Why must you bring out the past in this manner? Oh, why, why? On a more serious note, it's interesting how innovation always appears to be right around the corner, yet it doesn't happen fast enough when you breath and live technology.
And while technology has indeed evolved a great deal, I am not sure whether I can say that it has effected the type of social change that I once thought it would bring about. Solved my printing problems it did! Score: 3. I remember using this in High School - the problem was the C64 printer couldn't print descenders in text mode, so all my "g"s and "p"s where pushed up and the teachers didn't like that.
With Geos I could print just about any font, but boy do those dot matrix printers make a racket printing graphics! Re:Don't laugh Score: 2. Re:VIC 20 Score: 2. GEOS will not run on it. Re:What is everyone asleep? Reminds me of today, booting WindowsXP on a 3Ghz machine GEOS worked well if you had the hardware.
I used a program called Maverick which included a utility called geoBoot I think that would allow me to make custom boot disks for GEOS - once the GEOS kernel initialized, Maverick would interrupt it, and dump it out to floppy, thus making a 30KB or so program to run.
I loved the environment of geoProgrammer, although using geoWrite for a source code editor was a bit painful but, with the REU, it wasn't so bad. The GEOS fast-disk routines were very timing specific, so it might not. Maybe I'll give it a try. Re:How's the bandwidth in Afghanistan these days? Re:Sounds cool Score: 3 , Informative. Its use of Motif also predated some of the other uses. Too bad. GEOS was much the same way. Like a cow shoved through the food manufacturing process and split into a million pieces, parts of GEOS showed up in the ingredient lists of all sorts of weird products.
Among the places where GEOS showed its bones:. It was capable of basic word-processing, graphical web-browsing, and could even edit a spreadsheet. But it did have something up its sleeve: GEOS. The company collaborated with GeoWorks on a set of printer variations that added basic word processing and desktop publishing capabilities to the mix.
They were still typewriters, but they did slightly more interesting things than write type. And much like netbooks, reviewers hated them. When I wrote the original piece, it ended kind of sadly, as it had been written at a time when GeoWorks, as a concept, was at its proverbial fork in the road after passing through a whole series of hands. The good news is, GEOS has found its direction once again.
But perhaps its longest legacy was in the hands of a firm named Breadbox, which had essentially treated GeoWorks as a volunteer upkeep project, with the eventual goal of turning the GEOS into an educational software platform that worked in tandem with Android. But as I noted at the end of my original story from the platform faced a devastating setback when one of its maintainers, Frank S.
Fischer, died unexpectedly. Fellow maintainer John F. Which is great news! GEOS was many things over the years, but never open source.
Managed by a firm named blueway. Softworks, the application took a complicated route to open source, TechRepublic reporter James Sanders noted in March , including agreements with the former rights-holders. Speaking to the publication, blueway.
The goal, he adds, is to give it state-of-the-art features and improve its level of support. Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! Live and breathe all the technical details in this?
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