On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Ben Scott<[email protected]> wrote: > I think it was called "PC Link", but I might be getting that > confused with something else. > > PC/GEOS, AKA GeoWorks Ensemble!
I didn't read ahead in the thread to look at other answers before making mine. So more commentary: On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:21 PM, Steven M. Caesare<[email protected]> wrote: > Correct on the bonus questions (It was a C64 and C128 service). D'oh! That's right, PC/GEOS was "PC/" because it came first for the Commodore! On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Steven M. Caesare<[email protected]> wrote: > http://www.dsgames.net/qlink/q-link/qlink-history.htm Ah, yes. PC-Link and Quantum Link were the same company, different service. I had the PC-Link app in the DeskMate software on my Tandy, too. Tried the free trial. Didn't buy. Never bothered trying AOL in PC/GEOS. By then I had discovered local BBSes. > Not sure they ever had a Geos version.. but Geos itself was amazing for what > it did on that platform. I dunno if CVC/Q-Link/AOL/etc ever a GUI for Commodore GEOS, but they definitely did for PC/GEOS. I seem to recall that was their *original* GUI for the PC, before MS Windows. There may even have been AOL diskettes shipped with the PC/GEOS base environment for that purpose. Commodore GEOS was indeed amazing for what it could do with just a floppy diskette and 64 KB RAM. PC/GEOS was way cool, too. Some of the things it did: * Ran on top of MS-DOS * WIMP GUI * Preemptive multitasking * Multithreaded applications * Long file names (without extensions to 8.3 FAT) * File type associations * 256 color VGA support * A "Start Menu"-like menu in every window (next to the control menu) * WYSIWYG applications * Common device drivers (printer and video) It had a state preservation mechanism, such that if you shutdown PC/GEOS, any open applications would restore on restart. Kind of like modern hibernation/suspend-to-disk, except it was much faster, and it didn't need to be explicitly invoked. If would recover to within a minute or so even for power failures, OS crashes, etc. The GUI was modular. They also had a GEOS for some handheld that floppy. If one recompiled their app for the handheld GEOS, then the same app would appear with a handheld-style GUI instead of the WIMP GUI on the PC. No source code changes required. (Unlike, say, WinCE.) All that, on my Tandy, with 640 KB RAM, an 8 MHz 8088, and a 40 MB hard disk. The core of PC/GEOS was less than < 1 MB. I once got the GUI to start from floppy disk. It took like 10 minutes, and had no apps, but it got to the desktop. GeoWrite had an elegance which MS Word has never yet achieved. It only did a small part of what Word does today, but GeoWrite did the "80% that most people need" better than anything else I've used. Ah, those were the days! ;-) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
