Sam Ewalt wrote:
>New Deal now has an integrated web browser
>called "Skipper".
News to me, and I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the older computer
browsers still available out there. They might want to shout a little
louder if they want to be heard....
>It comes with the New Deal
>Office or New Deal School Suite. The last I
>checked (about two years ago) you had to buy
>it to try it.2
>Very functional, but expensive software for
>free computers.
Hear, hear!
>New Deal (formerly Geoworks) is a really good
>DTP and word processing
p>rogram. Don't know about their other stuff.
Formerly Berkeley Softworks. The story goes that they were approached by
the airlines to develop a GUI operating system for 6502 chips, to use on
airliners. Each passenger would get a touchscreen, and they could use it to
order overpriced junk (excuse me, "exclusive merchandise") from the
airline's store. Only the airlines later figured out what a system like
that was going to weigh, and decided against it.
That left Berkeley with a GUI for the 6502, and no market. They started
looking around at other systems that used the 650, and found the Commodore
64/128 operating under a rather crude BASIC developed for tape systems.
They created the GEOS operating system for Commodore, and Commodore packaged
it with every computer. GEOS included a word processor and paint program,
but Berkeley then offered other software, like a desktop publisher, that
would work under Geos.
They eventually tried to crack the Apple II market with a GEOS for that
unit, but it was too late in the game to make much progress there. So they
moved to the low-end DOS market, changing their name to Geoworks somewhere
in the process. GEOS was not "ported" directly, but anyone familiar with
the Commodore version can see similarities. (And to the extent new software
still occasionally appears for the Commodore, virtually all of it makes use
of GEOS; it really has been a Commodore lifesaver.) So it's no wonder
Geoworks can write well for low-end DOS machines; once you're used to
writing for 64K and a 1mhz processor, writing for even a low-end '286 must
seem like heaven!
