Indeed. Too bad they never thrived after transitioning to the x86 world, as
they obviously had some amazing coding talent.
That's very cool regarding what it could on the PC.
On the 64KB/1Mhz C64 (with only a 170KB 5.25" floppy), it implemented:
- A GUI with
-proportional fonts
-WYSIWIG support
-a variety of dot matrix printer support
-color bitmap support
-native compressed graphics support (a RLE encoding implementation)
-full menuing support
-Icon/desktop/file mgr metaphor
-virtual memory of sorts
-bank memory switching (unmapping the native c64 ROM to expose 16K additional
RAM)
-mouse support
-cut/copy/paste
-spell checker/dictionary
-custom font support
-a pseudo pre-emptive OS (no multiple apps, but the OS could preempt the app)
-a database with variable length record support
-programming environment w/ interactive resident debugger
-eventual bank-switched memory beyond 64K (up to 512KB)
-office apps including word processor(with mail merge from the database),
spreadsheet(with charting), database, and page layout
And a bunch of other stuff. All in 64K, which meant the kernel had to be
_REALLY_ compact.
Lots of cool memory lane paths for walking here:
http://lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/geos.html
-sc
-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 11:38 PM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Re: [OT][Humor] AOL
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! ~
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