Microsoft and Apple Wanted This OS - GeoWorks Rise and Fall

[@18000rpm]

I worked for Geoworks in 1993. All development was done in assembly language with their own object-oriented extensions. That's why it ran so fast on low-end PCs. Development was done on Sun workstations tethered to a PC.

[@cy6erGn0m]

At github there is a repo named bluewaysw/pcgeos. It's mostly written in assembly and seems relevant

[@MKA_NET]

I worked for Geoworks tech support. I loved that job.

[@MrGeocidal]

First time I've ever heard anyone say that about a tech support job

[@joerhorton]

@@MrGeocidal I have worked in Tech for 30 years, loved all my jobs tbh, it is just the upper Management that have been the problem.

[@SLAYERSARCH]

you can clearly see how they ripped off the UI

[@bewilderbeestie]

One thing you didn't mention is that the office suite applications were all really the same application --- you could embed spreadsheets inside word processor documents, put vector graphics in a spreadsheet cell, add word processor text to the drawing package, all arbitrarily. The UI would seamlessly change depending on what you were doing. All the data would be stored in a single file (which, BTW, allowed long filenames right from the very beginning --- no DOS 8.3 filenames here!). It was all incredibly smooth.

[@bchristian85]

All features "new" to Windows 95 and Office 95. GEOS did it years before.

[@Kingofallfunnelheads]

@@bchristian85 Never knew this!

[@dougjohnson4266]

Because PC-GEOS/Ensemble was stuck in x86 real mode, the future of the product was limited. By the time W95 was released, it was over. Still, for its time, it was a fantastic product. You do not need to close out a program before starting another. It also has preemptive multitasking and you can shutdown with apps open and it would open them all back in the same location with whatever docs just as you left it.

[@Underestimated37]

yup they also deliberately closed off the windows API with hidden features that Microsoft only knew of that allowed their apps to outstrip competitors. A lawsuit was launched to force MS to be more open but by the time that resolved (not in MS’s favour too) all the competitors had been killed off.

[@Underestimated37]

@arnolduk123 nah they had a secret subset of their SDK that was undocumented and ran faster than the standard sdk, and they used that to push competitors out of the market

[@Underestimated37]

@arnolduk123 a quick google to find a source found this: The 1992 book Undocumented Windows: A Programmer’s Guide to Reserved Windows API Functions by Andrew Schulman, David Maxey, and Matt Pietrek, lists them. Its section on “Microsoft’s Use of Undocumented Windows” begins on page 28, and it also has a discussion of the then-ongoing FTC case against Microsoft. There’s one other case, then recent, the book discusses that ambiguously falls under this: the “Geary incident.” Microsoft did not provide a documented means to hook into its font rasterizer, so Adobe Type Manager scanned the system DLL and hot-patched it. After an Adobe programmer, Michael Geary, posted about this trick on a Compuserve forum, Microsoft both accused him of revealing trade secrets and changed Windows so that the Adobe product would patch a block of decoy code instead.

[@stickinthemud23]

Word

[@stickinthemud23]

@arnolduk123As they said, undercutting their competitors to control the market.

[@samshort365]

Geoworks Ensemble was my favourite GUI on my 386sx Laptop. I recently installed it on a VM just for a bit of nostalgia. TY, Dan.

[@dbranconnier1977]

The Brother Geobook laptops ran Geoworks.

[@balintmagyar3285]

These are the moments people feel proud living long enough. 😊 I remember having a few days experience with Geoworks 2nd edition as a kid. We were guests for a few days and could use a computer with this OS.

[@RetroRecipes]

Yay a new Dan Wood vid! 👍🕹

[@Thiesi]

Wow, I had no idea the _Dan Wood Retro Programme_ could be received over - or better under - in _Lost Angeles!_

[@RetroRecipes]

@@Thiesi I'll have to add another verse to the song now!

[@PHSPictures]

​@@Thiesi- Dan Wood's (like Perifractic's) influence reaches everywhere and everyone. However, only Ladyfractic can touch my heart. 😊

[@nneeerrrd]

​@@RetroRecipeshow is CCPway business going, coward?

[@BillAnt]

Like the old 1980/90's Dae Wooo!! lol

[@szabolcsmate5254]

15:33 - NO! That's not "changing the looks"! That's switching it to RPN! Reverse Polish Notation is a big deal for calculator enthusiasts!

[@TheDesertBlizzard]

I loved this software. It ruined Windows 3.1 for me to the point where I ended up migrating from Ensemble to OS/2 Warp simply because Win3.1 felt like such a downgrade from Ensemble.

[@richardsequeirateixeira]

you are not the only one who migrated to IBM OS/2. A lot of the features of GeoWorks Ensemble ended up being on the OS/2 Workspace.

[@BillAnt]

You see, it's not always good to be the leader and innovator in some fields. Lagging Windows took over via they sheer marketing power. heh

[@valenrn8657]

Ensemble 1.2 is "16-bit". Windows 3.1 386 "32bit" mode with Win32S.

[@TheDesertBlizzard]

@@valenrn8657 "felt". Thanks for the "well actually".

[@stickinthemud23]

Me too.

[@emdxemdx]

@6:20 Back when I was working on Macs 30 years ago, we had a phone dialer program that played the DTMF tones on the computer speaker itself, so if you wanted to dial a number, you picked up the phone, held it near the bulit-in speaker and clicked "DIAL", and the program would play the tones and your number would be dialed without having to touch the phone keypad…

[@da_pawz]

I remember one of my older cousin had a a calculator phone dialer device... That little device was a life saver for me, because our parents locked the dialer on the phone but that device made that lock useless lol

[@emdxemdx]

@@da_pawz ■ Back then, you could also dial by simulating the dialing pulses by pressing the hook buttons… It even worked with coin phones, until Ma Bell figured the trick out and disabled that…

[@benholroyd5221]

Psions, the 3 at least had this. It synced with the contacts app. So you could call a contact.

[@toby9999]

My friend was a Commadore dealer. I can remember GEOS. People would come into the store to have a play. The Amiga OS was also better than the original MS DOS and/or Windows. Was 10 years ahead of its time. Of course, the Amiga was quite a different thing. Sadly, it lost market share pretty quickly.

[@michaelshopshire5819]

I was a PhD student.at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986, and bought GEOS for my Apple //c. GEOS was.developed in the city of Berkeley. It was slow on my //c, but excellent on my new IBM 286 PS/1 monochrome black and white VGA monitor in 1990. I wrote my dissertation on Word Perfect but used GEOS for the figures. I purchased all the subsequent versions of the software out of loyalty into 2000 as,I recall. Of course I used Windows when I had my first job in 1993 and had state of the art computers at UCSF. I liked how GEOS (later version, new name) was later marketed as a way that older computers could be used with a GUI for people who could not afford a Windows compatible computer in 2000.

[@adg1355]

Actually, the university had BSD by then

[@18000rpm]

@@michaelshopshire5819 I interned at Geoworks while I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley. It was just down the street on Shattuck Ave.

[@michaelshopshire5819]

@@18000rpm A friend of mine the other day was trying to figure out where on Stattuck Berkeley Softworks was located. (I spent my career at UC and I do not think the logo was legal!!) I moved to a place on Shattuck for six months in 2022 on a whim. I think I had an inaccurate memory of downtown Berkeley, but trying to relive my youth. I lived on 1915 Milvia when I used the Geoworks software in 1988-1990. The entire area has many high rise buildings now. UC Berkeley now has buildings on Shattuck, and plans to build many more near Shattuck. (From posts on KZbin, some people do not realize how large UC Berkeley is or the difference between "Cal" and the City of Berkeley)

[@18000rpm]

@@michaelshopshire5819 when I was there in 1993 it was at 2150 Shattuck Ave ie. the tall building at the corner.

[@michaelshopshire5819]

@@18000rpm Yes, thanks! That is what I had thought all these years, across the street from the Wells Fargo Building and by the main BART Station entrance. My friend thought it was somewhere else. In 2022, I moved down the street next to the public library.

[@PaulVandersypen]

Back in the Commodore days, one of the contributing authors in a magazine published a proof of concept game for the Commodore 128 running in GEOS which was in colour. Until then, it was claimed that GEOS was incapable of colour because of hardware limitations.

[@epobirs]

The mode used was a B&W mode but as with ports from the Apple ][ line to Atari and Commodore, the technique of artifacting used flaws of the NTSC display standard to create two additional colors. The interesting aspect of such ports is that each platform produced different colors through artifacting, so it was possible to look at a screenshot of a game available of all three machine and tell which one it was running on.

[@ActionRetro]

Always a good day when there's a new Dan Wood video!

[@kaseyboles30]

Ran geos on a C64. They did some really clever things with the quirks of the 6510 for copy protection. The 6502 opcodes were all that worked on the 6502, However the 6510 clone didn't block unintended opcodes so you had several weird ones with odd behaviors that most assemblers of the time, being aimed at 6502 machine code, knew nothing about. You needed a disassembler that knew 6510's 'hidden' or 'illegal' opcodes.

[@cdnsoul5808]

It was ahead of it's time. I also loved Qdos, the precursor to MS-Dos, which was a CP/M variant.

[@oidpolar6302]

M$oft screwed up lots of genius products providing nothing in the replacement but the "fake it till you make it" principle

[@TekTherapy]

Finally a Dan Wood video again.. day is complete!

[@sohl947]

I was and am a big fan of GEOS on C64 and Geoworks Ensemble on a 486 PC. Made good use of the later in the early to mid 90s, mostly for some light desktop publishing. Thanks for a great run-through video!

[@timduvall4910]

Back in the day, I was a beta tester for Geoworks. We were given things like a CD ROM drive and sound cards to test with Geoworks. We were allowed to keep them after the test was over. Back then CD ROM's were in their infancy and they were EXPENSIVE!. Roasturkey, SacTomato, Camilee... you guys still out there?

[@Egg-kh2xo]

Windows 95 - all three version run on top of dos - as did all other domestic versions until XP. It was just more hidden as DOS installed with the GUI. Prior we had CP/M which was considered an OS. DOS is an OS and we had other GUI front ends for DOS like XTREE. So the distinction here is more one of GUI over DOS which includes up to windows XP (ignoring networking ports) and integrated DOS and GUI. So at this time this would most certainly be (collectively) considered an OS even though it was GUI over DOS.

[@valenrn8657]

Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 have a direct pathway to full 32-bit, memory-protected, pre-emptive multitasking Windows NT.

[@Chordonblue]

@@valenrn8657 Well... Sorta. Windows 3.1 to Windows NT, yes. Win 95 to Win NT - not so much. 95 had a lot of user-based features that didn't happen in NT until Windows 2000 Workstation/Server. Things like Device Manager and the app registry. In Windows NT, you still had to worry about configuring IRQ/Address/DMA settings for your hardware cards, as there was no automatic method for the OS to make the changes itself. In addition, just as in Windows 3.1, apps basically wrote whatever files they liked, wherever they liked. NT wasn't much different. Win 95's registry changed all that. It also standardized app installation/removal - something that could be painful in the 3.1/NT world. I used to configure Windows NT machines for the earliest non-linear video editing systems, back in the day and getting SCSI cards/drives to work with capture cards along with networking cards was like playing Twister. Glad that nightmare is over!

[@valenrn8657]

@@Chordonblue Windows NT 4.0 has a registry with regedit32 and up to DirectX3 (via NT Service Pack 3). Windows NT4 can support legacy plug-and-play by installing Pnpisa inf from the Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM. This enables Windows NT4 to detect (but not configure) the registered plug-and-play devices in the motherboard BIOS e.g. locate Pnpisa inf on the Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM. Legacy plug-and-play is not a major issue when my sound card is a PCI-based Yamaha YMF724 sound card. I used Windows NT 4.0 during my university years and played GLQuake, Quake 2 OpenGL, Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament games.

[@valenrn8657]

@@Chordonblue Windows NT4 has legacy plug-and-play support; you have to install an .inf file on the installation CD. My sound card was YMF724 PCI.

[@valenrn8657]

​@@Chordonblue Legacy PnP is another issue from the full 32-bit, memory-protected, multi-user, and pre-emptive multitasking. Win 95's registry is from Windows NT 3.51 e.g. MS Office 97 supports Windows NT 3.51. Windows NT 3.51 kernel base enables it to run a large number of Win32 applications designed for Windows 95. Windows NT 3.51 has a NewShell update that offers Windows 95 GUI. Windows NT 3.51 supports OpenGL.

[@Cyco_Nix]

As we have seen throughout the history of computers and technology, the best doesn't always win.

[@britlion]

I remember using Geoworks - probably 1.0 when I was on an 8086 PC, and with a 9 pin dot matrix printer. The print drivers were indeed amazing. It looked gorgeous. It was slow - like 6 pass per line, but managed to make the little relatively cheap printer look incredible.

[@ipponyc]

I thought GEOS and GEOS 2.0 were for the Commodore 64 and 128. That's awesome! I learned something new. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!

[@leandromacedooliveira8912]

And is, technically GEOS and PC/GEOS are different systems.

[@alain99v6]

in the mid 90's Geoworks Ensemble helped me to sell a big load of Philips 286 12 mghz pc that I bought for very cheap from the Canadian gov surplus. currently rebuilding an XT turbo pc that I want to upgrade with a Picomem card I would love to find extra softwares for Ensemble

[@roymerkel8008]

My favorite at the time was Commady Hour (the missile defense clone where you are blocking the tomatoes from hitting the bad commedians, which was part of the After Hours games collection).

[@n.stephan9848]

Thank you for mentioning FreeGEOS, I wasn't aware of it's existence. It's nice to see such an initially innovative operating system survive.

[@binarydinosaurs]

I've been all about the old stuff since 1998, I know GEOS, I used CDE at work on DEC Alpha. How have I never heard of this?! Maybe I have and just lumped it in with GEOS, but...! Amazing. Yet another 'what if'.

[@Trelgger]

Thank God, you're still alive.

[@johnny14794]

I use to own a Tandy Zoomer PDA that ran on GEOS and had also DOS 1.0 as it's base. It was very expensive at the time. I managed to hack it and do cmd in DOS and even run simple DOS programs. It was a fun PDA. Found your channel out of the blue and I really enjoyed it very much. You've earned a new subscriber. Keep these kinds of video coming. They are excellent! Cheers.

[@danwood_uk]

Thanks, interesting to hear about the Zoomer! I'll have to try to pick one up.

[@sashakoshka]

a shame that this fell by the wayside. imagine if it were more successful, and the motif style got modernized over the years instead of microsoft's

[@a62dave]

What a trip down memory lane! 🤩 I started with a C64 running GEOS 1.2, graduated to 2.0, then got a C128D running GEOS 128 with the “128” versions of geoWrite, geoSpell, geoMerge, geoPublish, geoCalc, geoBase/geoFile, etc. I skipped GeoWorks for PC and went straight to Win95 in 1997.

[@joshuadramsey]

Had no idea about this one. I definitely remember the company's C64 GEOS, though. When I was a teenager, I pulled out my childhood C64 and found that the "old" GEOS loading disk was bad. So, I ended up throwing out disks with my childhood journal entries and stories written in GEOS, since I had nothing to view them with. Ugh.

[@Mrshoujo]

Should have kept it all anyway.

[@e8root]

I never threw away any disks. That is what basement is for.

[@rs.matr1x]

Funny how it was originally called GEOS but was never technically an OS. I suppose now that it's open source, under the Apache license, one could theoretically make it a full OS rather than solely a shell/productivity suite.

[@fnjesusfreak]

Perhaps by integrating it into MS-DOS 4.01, which is also open source?

[@BozesanVlad]

Or make it a shell as an alternative for Linux ones

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

No, GEOS for Commodore 8-bit actually replaced Commodore's own kernel, "Kernal," with its own upon boot. So it actually IS an operating system for some computer models. Berkeley even named their kernel the "GEOS Kernal," after Commodore's spelling mishap that created that name "Kernal." You can even see that discussed a little bit in the Kernal encyclopedia entry.

[@stuartaxon2898]

DRDOS has proper multitasking (and was going to be the base of System 7 on PC "project startrek")

[@wesley00042]

Windows 95, 98 and Me also weren't operating systems.

[@Splungified]

It's funny that you published this video right now. I was just having a conversation about our old computers in chat the other day and I mentioned how we used GeoWorks on our 286. We had a C64 before that, but we never had a copy of GEOS for it.

[@theo-dr2dz]

It is not about the operating system. It is about the applications. No matter how good the os is, if it lacks applications, it willl fail. OS's don't sell computers, applications do. Only supernerds spend their time mucking around with the os, the vast majority of people just use the os to launch applications and as little as possible for anything else.

[@jovetj]

That's right.

[@lundsweden]

I'd go even further, yes to what you said, but also it needs to come pre installed on the computer.

[@JeffreyJibson]

Agree I worked at a computer store when this first came out. We got a deal for employees to get this dirt cheap with the store buying a number of packages to resale. So, I picked it up. I stopped using it because I couldn't write anything for it. I was a CS major at the time.

[@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung]

@lundsweden Not really. I bought my mother a laptop on Amazon that ships with Ubuntu (I know, next you'll tell me Bigfoot's here too) And within one week she had installed Windows 7 from the boot CD so she could download the Windows 10 installation media from Microsoft's website. Once again, software support is the key, and only factor in what sells something. Another key point is Windows Phone, it only failed due to a lack of software support, it was installed from the factory like Android.

[@myne00]

Exactly. Source: windows phone.

[@barrycheesemore2928]

Wow, now there's a blast from the past! I remember a mate of mine running GEOS on his C64 many years ago. Brilliant video, really informative!

[@UnbornApple]

My first computer was a 16 MHz Laser 386 SX. It was a budget computer when 486s were becoming the standard, so it came with GeoWorks instead of Windows. I was always fascinated by it, and the fact it had an AOL client.

[@PetriA83]

Good to see you back KZbin

[@ManuelSLaraBisch]

I remember using GeoWorks Ensemble 2.0 a lot on my first two PCs as a kid, first my dad's old 386SX and later a 486. These machines also had Windows 3.1 on them, but I preferred the Solitaire version on GeoWorks because the cards looked fancier and the game allowed multiple undo operations in a row as opposed to the single undo under Windows. Tetris was another big point in its favour. I also remember feeling very impressed at how sharp the font rendering looked (though I never had any need to use the DTP features as an 8-11 year-old). I never knew about its ability to simplify and complexify the UI of programs according to the user skill level until today. I do remember seeing the program level buttons and wondering about their purpose, but as far as I recall I never experimented with them. Very impressive stuff. Maybe some modern apps could also benefit from such an approach, instead of making an inexperienced user search through seemingly endless menus containing every feature and setting under the sun to find the one basic thing they want to do. (These days my dad often calls me for help with that …)

[@MegaManNeo]

Always only saw this on screenshots, this looks really really cool especially in earlier incarnations when Windows didn't yet fully arrived.

[@therealyogibear2k225]

I am 53 and never heard of geoworks before. In my school we never had computers, the school couldnt afford them. They were unnecessary to our learning, we were told. Mind you this was back in the 70's and early 80's. It didn't change me though. I still loved computers back then with my first being a dragon 32. An amazing computer at the time. My first computer inused outside the home was a pc at college. Always dreamt of getting one of those until i got my first Amiga.500, then thus was so far superior to the pc. Now the pc can emulate the Amiga perfectly so i can have the best of both worlds. Interesting video. I might see if i can download a copy of geoworks foryself.

[@mystica-subs]

The 8086 computer my uncle gave me around 1993 to 1994 had ensemble 1.2 on it. This is my youth here as well❤

[@whochecksthis]

I totally remember this setup on systems and loved its history with commodore. I ran my dad’s business on my c-128 with the suite from geos. Wrote a lot of my college papers with it, and a Star micro line printer… Time travel, where are you?

[@mchenrynick]

I remember printing banners on my continuous sheet dot matrix printer with a Commodore 64 running PrintMaster =)

[@cammobus]

I had GEOS for the Commodore pin 1986 ... took forever to load on a C64 and there was NO Memory left to do anything when you did But this was still cool to have

[@theodricaethelfrith]

There were hacks for the OmniGo to expose the full Geos UI, as well as the underlying DOS, but the square screen cropped everything and made the experience unpleasant. I did it anyway 🤪

[@rangersmith4652]

I got through my first Masters (in Composition and Rhetoric) on a Laser Pal 286 running GeoWorks Enseble over DOS 4.01. Eventually I installed WordPerfect 5.0 to match what my university was using, but I could have been perfectly happy using GeoWrite. I can't remember that machine ever crashing or losing data. I don't want to go back to GeoWorks, but it was very cool at the time.

[@codingwithculp]

I never used GeoWorks on PC but I used GEOS on my C64. In 1988 I was a freshmen in college and moved in with a girl who was a journalism major who used my C64 with GEOS for all her journalism and desktop publishing stuff. GEOS when combined with a RAM expansion, 2 drives and a hardware disk accelerator was actually quite nice to use.

[@Joooooooooooosh]

I had a pocket computer from Radio Shack in 1994 that ran GEOS. It was so ahead of its time.

[@hgesser]

Yes, the font system was excellent. I remember that on a large paragrph you could change the font size from, say, 12 pt to 11.9 pt, and that would actually make a tiny change (when Word for Windows would only let you pick integers, 11 pt, 12 pt etc.).

[@dcmark65]

It was quite jaw-dropping to see a dot matrix printer producing text that looks like it's from a laser printer. It took like an hour to print a page but the result was stunning.

[@danw1955]

I had the latest version of GeoWorks Ensemble (2.01) running on a 1996 Packard Bell 66mhz?, I think. I loved it, especially the banner printing program which I used to make the first sign for my new PC repair business that I opened in '96. It's too bad that they sort of cut their own throats with the overpriced development kit to create new programs. It actually felt more stable than early versions of Windows and the interface was a lot more intuitive.😉👍👍

[@going_it_alone]

Nostalge. I upgraded from a TRS-80 to a 286 with Geoworks Ensamble 2.0. Huge leap! It had a hard drive! The computer was called a Sensor. The system components were white. It was gorgeous with Geoworks on the screen. 386's with Windows 3.1 was all the rage so I was still quite behind. This was about the same time I bought the very first release of Netscape. $60.00 in an oversized box. My neighbour popped by and was blown away by how fast my computer was. His 386 with Win3.1 could not match a 286 with Geoworks Ensamble. I hated leaving Geoworks behind. I wonder if I could get it running on a Chromebook. That would be sweet.

[@bajinaji]

Fantastic video Dan! Really great. I follow you guys on the Retro Hour, and this kicks me very much in the feels. I'm a developer (at 48 years old now) that started by owning a C64 as a young teenager (harder than it might sound in country Victoria living on a property without electricity in a caravan - we did have a generator). I had Geos ... honestly I never did much with it and found it a bit slow on a stock machine, which was all I could ever afford. However as I grew and learned the complexities of programming ... the wizardry involved was thoroughly impressive. I briefly tried Geo Works, and thought it was great ... but by then (1996 when I saw it) ... there just wasn't a good use case for a 17 year old kid just using Windows 95 with so many more applications. But everything you presented is how I feel about such alternatives and really rather fantastic pieces of software. Thank you so much for an excellent presentation.

[@danwood_uk]

Thanks, really appreciate the nice feedback :)

[@tchang5906]

I got a chance to use this software when it came out and one thing I remember was how well the high quality printer output worked on dotmatrix printers worked. It would print each dot line closer than normal to achieve laser printer like results! The word processor and drawing program worked great on a 286!

[@j.tann1970]

There is also another OS for the PC people have forgotten exists and is based on the 16-bit OS for the Atari ST; GEM. It was the GUI of choice on the Amstrad PC range.

[@bewilderbeestie]

GEM wasn't anything like as sophisticated; it was a single-tasking desktop shell. A good one, but GEOS beat the pants off it. GEM has been open source for years (I was involved in one of the first open source GEM distributions for DOS).

[@j.tann1970]

@@bewilderbeestie if you worked on the open source of GEM then you would know that your assertion it's single tasking is not strictly true. GEM could load helper apps selectable in the Desk menu that could be run inside other GEM based programs. It's not true multitasking but it does count as more than one task loaded at the same time even if the main program is put on pause while the app is running. Though I think some apps, on the ST at least, could use interrupts to allow them to do simple tasks in the background which is a form of multitasking.

[@Chordonblue]

@@j.tann1970 Yes. But you had to write them DAMNED carefully. You crash that background GEM app and it could crash your entire stack. Ah, the 'good' 'ol days. 😀

[@t.gadway6729]

There was also a multitasking version of GEM called GEMXM, (which didn't really need extended memory) which swapped programs to disk when another program was used. Never officially released, one of the volunteer projects included it as a download. I've used it a while back, it works.

[@RandyWinchester1]

I loved GEOS on the Commodore 64 and 128! I wrote the Antigrav Toolkit Notebook column for the old GeoWorld magazine that was mostly about hacking GEOS applications and PostScript laser printers. GEOS 64 for the Commodore worked great with the brand new Apple Laserwriter! It's really a surprise that this software was beat out by Windows.

[@leek4994]

Also got my start in DRDos/GeoWorks! Great trip down memory lane, thank you for making the video.

[@johnangelico667]

Hi Dan, found you in my explore YT feed. Yes, I tried GeoWorks briefly in the late 80s. But then OS/2 came out, and apart from the ICL 1900 series mainframe OSs George 3 and George 4, OS/2 (now known as ArcaOS) that remains my favourite. I nearly created a small-business accounting package using the Warp 4 Desktop environment with DB2/2 (database not bundled) and ReXX (interpreter bundled). I guess you could say GeoWorks primed me for OS/2, although that caravan has moved on, and now I use Ubuntu Linux.

[@lobitome]

I LOVED GeoWorks back in the day. As a young buck teying to do desktop publishing, GW had some capabilities that I needed from the expensive programs, but for dirt cheap. GeoDraw & GeoWrite helped me upgrade to the expensive software later on.

[@RandomBitzzz]

Oldest machine I ever ran this on was a 286. It ran so much better than Windows on slower hardware.

[@redsorgum]

Ha! Tandy 286 was my first computer I bought from Radio Shack….🤪

[@dennisfahey2379]

Graphical frontends were a short phase of the journey. Competing on the PC were Microsoft Windows, IBM TopView, Digital Research GEM (on top of their CP/M), GEOS and a few others. Apple tried to re-write history as the first GUI capable machine but of course it predates their LISA implementation. Apple had the advantage of being a closed architecture making the much smaller variety of graphics and peripherals easier to code. I can recall buy Windows 1.0, with its stack of floppies, and having virtually nothing that ran on it. There was on Desktop Publishing Product (Aldus Pagemaker) which required you by font packages (the origin of Adobe) to be useful. It was the period where the soup was starting to come together and sadly so much good work was left in the dust. I seem to recall, and maybe its fiction, that GEOS found its way into early cellphones because they did not need the diversity of applications. Be interesting if anyone know if that is true. I wonder how it would run on a modern virtual machine. It was written to be BIOS compliant so it may just run perfectly.

[@danh5637]

I had Geoworks at school. I loved it!I seem to remember at the time it was being pushed as a better windowing system to DOS that was superior to windows and cost less.

[@noisetheorem]

I remember GEOS on my C64 and 128. I actually used it for writing school papers. It was…very slow…but it got the job done!

[@grewdpastor]

Geoworks was used by me because it was the "OS" that made it possible to print decent looking letters with my Star dot-matrix printer. Later it became possible to "incorporate" a Spreadsheet program (the name of that I cannot remember) and in this way I could do almost all off the office tasks I needed. Later on I switched to a RiscPC (Acorn): that was a lot faster.🙂 I am getting really old ...

[@t.gadway6729]

IIR GEOS was built using assembler (or assembly?), a very efficient language permitting the OS to do so much on 640K.

[@ste76539]

I was at high school in the mid eighties - the school had over 2500 pupils, they had two BBC Acorns. My entire school life I managed to touch one twice - I think I was able to type a couple of sentences and that was it. That was my crucial "computers are the future" education.

[@ishmairdow]

I had geoworks on my old 286. I still have all floppy disks. nice to know geoworks is still going. I have old files to convert.

[@airfixer9461]

Great video, I'm also a fan and used it in the early days on my NEC V20 8088 pc..ran great on such a system. I still have several copies of Geoworks in y software collection today, an American Geoworks Pro 1.28 (with Borland Quattro SE speadsheet included), a French 1.2, a Dutch 1.28 and an German 1.2. Great stuff to have in a collection. Geoworks also runs fune under Windows 95 (but you'll need some tweaks to get it running).

[@MistaGoodbytes]

At last, a new Dan Wood video! But as always it has been well worth the wait. Great video, I remember reading about GEOS in Commodore Format in around 1994. By this time it was so late in the C64’s life, trying to find software locally was almost impossible.

[@alaricsnellpym]

I liked the fact you could oin the menus with that button at the top. An intriguing nod to user customisation of the UI, as you could oin the menus you used most onscreen...

[@GarlandCoulson]

Love GEOS on my Commodore 64, then got my first IBM compatible PC - excited about 10x the RAM, but really disappointed going from GEOS to MS Dos. Fortunately I was able to get GeoWorks for my PC. Great video!

[@terrytaylor9349]

Dan, You may not know that IBM licensed GeoWorks for the IBM K-12 schools division (EduQuest), called SchoolView, GeoWorks was modified to replace the DOS based ICLAS (IBM Classroom Admin System). Geoworks was chosed because it work very well on the 8088 based PS/2 model 25 and 30 that were the main workstations that EduQuest was selling for school use at the time. I was an IBM/EduQuest Systems Engineer during this time. SchoolView sold well, but was replaced by a Windows based version call SchoolVista.

[@CD3WD-Project]

This is back when programmers knew how to program code without putting in a ton of fluff. Something like that would be 10 gigs nowadays...

[@CD3WD-Project]

​@arnolduk123 I've worked in the IT field pretty much my whole life and played with computers since I was 5 years old. I think back a lot from the '90s and evening the early 2000s and a lot of times I only had dial-up my first mode on being a 300 bit and it amazes me how much we could get done in such a small amount of space programs in OSs have become so bloated it's absolutely insane and a lot of that has to do with sloppy programming and the compilers know it's easier for people to program overall nowadays but it puts a lot of unneeded junk in. It also I messes me how little I used The internet or even dial up services back in the day yet got so much accomplished nowadays if my internet goes out half the crap on my computer doesn't not even work properly. It's a sad state of affairs nowadays.

[@paper_gem]

Before programmers were passionate about computers. Nowadays programmers don't have that passion. They're just doing a job, and really don't give a darn about it.

[@Sauvenil]

@@paper_gem Programmers are still passionate about computers. Back then it was about squeezing every last bit of performance out of a limited machine. Now our machines are so unlimited that there is a lot of tolerance for waste with no drawbacks. We don't NEED to do that anymore. The other side of it is, your computer is actually doing a LOT more all at once now than computers did in the 80s and 90s. We're so much more needy now.

[@everyhandletaken]

@arnolduk123lol how long have you been a dev for?

[@rusi6219]

The internet is full of tiny operating systems

[@OptimusMonk01]

When Nokia et al made the Symbian company, it was a beauty contest between Geoworks, used on the original Communicator, and EPOC32 from Psion. EPOC32 won because it was... better. More stable, used less memory, better performance, better optimisations for ARM etc.

[@lundsweden]

I used the run GEOs on my old 8 bit Commodore 64 from '87 to '92.

[@semicuriosity257]

Windows 3.0 386 enhanced mode of Windows 3.0 provides a number of additional capabilities over standard mode: 1 . The capability for pre-emptive multitasking of DOS sessions. 2. Demand paging for efficient virtual memory. Windows 3.0 386 enhanced mode requires Ring 0 privilege level in the 80386 processor, which allows Windows or a Windows application to access all system memory and resources, including those belonging to the operating system itself.

[@NeonEUC]

lovely surprise. always makes my day seeing these rare videos you do 😊

[@staninjapan07]

Good one thanks. I remember the computers at upper school in the mid-late 80s, but I cannot be sure about their names. Maybe BBC something and possibly Acorn something as you said. Then nothing until I went to Uni as a "mature" student in 1993, where we had Windows 3.1 if memory serves. I think a lot of people forget, as with other technologies, that we are still in our infancy with computers and operating systems, despite having (in theory?) quantum computing. Perhaps it is because we have come quite along way (in quite a short time really) that some people tend to think that what we have now has been around for ages. I thought you might have mentioned the early Linux versions in the second half of the video, as that was a 90s thing, too. Now, of course, there are almost countless versions of it, or should I say "them"? I enjoyed this.

[@fragalot]

2:40 So were all version of Windows from version 1, 2, 3.1x, 95, 98 and Millennium Edition; they were all just GUIs on top of MS-DOS.

[@rickh8380]

Windows... The colorful clown suit for DOS.

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

From Windows 95 on, Windows had its own Kernel that used DOS to load, but was very much not just a gui built on top of dos. Dos was not a multitasking os, but Windows 95 onwards definitely were.

[@Hans-gb4mv]

No, they were not. I can't say for certain about the first two, but 3.0 swapped out the DOS kernel for its own kernel and staring with 95, Windows was able to load without first requiring to load DOS at all.

[@fragalot]

@@Hans-gb4mv That was never my experience with windows in the early days. DOS was always there sitting under windows. The kernel may have changed but dose't mean it wasn't there. Up until Windows 2000 and windows XP.

[@valenrn8657]

Windows 3.1 offered a path to Windows NT 3.1 or 3.5. Windows 95 offered a path to Windows NT 4.0.

[@null0byte]

Geoworks Ensemble and Windows 1-3.11 were known at the time as an OE, or, Operating Environment.

[@MK-of7qw]

I had no idea it did pre-emptive multitasking on so little memory years earlier than Windows 95.

[@tomperconti]

Nice video! I still own Geoworks Ensemble and NewDeal Office and still use them both. I had not neard of FreeGEOS before, now I have some research to do. 😂 Thanks again!

[@bazza5699]

great to see you back, dan

[@RenanSpolon]

I didn't know about this system, how incredible it was so far ahead of Microsoft in terms of user interface ease. It's very important to keep this precious piece of history in development, I loved knowing that well-intentioned people are continuing the system. 👑

[@compuguy71]

I remember that AOL for DOS, the first version I ever used, actually used GeoWorks. I wanted to learn more about GeoWorks and use it but couldn't find much information at the time.

[@MichaRabiej]

I suppose the RPN option on the calculator is not about calculator's look & feel, but it is "Reversed Polish Notation mode" basically you no longer input 2+5 but 2 5 +

[@randomfandom53]

Yessss a new video from Dan Wood! Thank you in advance sir!

[@raiden72]

4:50 i LOVE that logo, and the color scheme

[@e-mat6077]

I used Geoworks 1 in the early 90s. It already supported long file names in 1990/91. Windows didn´t manage to do this until Win95.

[@benyboybob]

Had this is my junior school! Amazing blast back to the past

[@imurrx]

I had this installed in a 386. I had a Amiga 2000 prior to this and I needed a better program than the constantly crashing Amiga version of WordPerfect. Nothing was more frustrating loosing pages of texts when it froze. I got a "copy" of windows 3.0, it performed better booting dos programs but ugly. I had no problem using DOS was pretty sold on using Word Perfect. I eventually uninstalled it. I started using windows 3.1 when it came out.

[@IainShepherd1]

Thanks. This is cool. I'm very glad it still has attention from developers. I think that is an advantage of GUIs that you end up with something that is shiny to show off that can still get attention today. (I was just down a rabbit hole looking at the MINIX OS which seems to have largely ceased after its main author retired. Never shiny!)

[@epobirs]

Linus Torvalds was inspired by MINIX to begin what became Linux. So, spiritually at least, the MINIX legacy continues in a kernel used in an immense range of devices.

[@paul_boddie]

MINIX development continued, and MINIX 3 is probably one of the most deployed operating systems out there due to Intel adopting it to run on the Management Engine in their processors.

[@more.power.]

Thanks Dan nice to see a new video from your channel

[@zulucain]

They could make it into a Linux GUI sort of like XFCE and such

[@StevenJennings-x8w]

In 1991 - at my secondary school… we had the amazing Nimbus 186 network (which I had the admin password so I can control the network lol)

[@webluke]

Microsoft's creation of Visual Basic for Windows was the biggest factor in winning the market. So many different types of software became GUI applications, and people who may not have been "real programmers" could drag and drop their way into software that ran many companies. I guess that's why they were "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS," not software engineers.

[@bobalex6323]

Back in the 90's I downloaded Geoworks from a BBS - we didn't have Internet, in fact we're pretty isolated back in Brazil. So I took the disks and installed on a IBM XT clone. It worked like a charm. It did't had all the capabilities of MS Windows, but it was pretty fast and perfect for text editing. It was a pity it didn't came along with other OS. Who knows what it could be today.

[@SockyNoob]

Wow, this looks extremely slick for the time. Definitely some programmers flexing their skills. It's no wonder it became popular on handhelds.

[@igordasunddas3377]

Hm, I started my journey in IT as a 6-year-old with GEM Desktop, GEM Paint and GEM Writer... And later everything, that followed.

[@blurandomnumber]

A great video on a beloved OS! Just a small nitpick @13:37 IIRC GEOS multitasking, at least natively (i.e. outside of any host dos multitasking extensions), and at least up to PC/GEOS 2.0, was not preemptive, but cooperative, just like win3.x, albeit with very well-behaved factory apps which would seldom misbehave timesharing-wise. I'm not familiar what the Nokia Communicator GEOS (beyond Ensemble 2.01) had as multitasking capabilities, so those may or may not have changed there.

[@SilverSpoon_]

I like the unix-style window decoration, much more intuitive than the tradi three things on the corner since 95. but needed more customizability and better pixel artists for the icon/GUI. that's all.