On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 12:28 AM, Steven M. Caesare<[email protected]> wrote: > Indeed. Too bad they never thrived after transitioning > to the x86 world, as they obviously had some amazing > coding talent.
Yah. That. A lot of that. > -virtual memory of sorts Oh, yah, I forgot about that. PC/GEOS had memory swapping, too. Not true "virtual memory", since that would require an MMU, and the 8086 didn't have one of those. No memory protection, for the same reason. Their code crashed less often than MS Windows does *with* an MMU, though. :) But I did have things blow up on me on rare occasions. The state restore came in *real* handy then. > -bank memory switching (unmapping the native c64 ROM to expose 16K additional > RAM) That kind of thing was less important on the PC, of course. You had a whopping 640 KB there. ;-) PC/GEOS might have supported EMS and/or XMS, though. I can't remember. > -a pseudo pre-emptive OS (no multiple apps, but the OS could preempt the app) Yah, I don't know how they did preemption on the 8088, since there was no hardware support for "real" processor tasks. I assume something driven off the timer interrupt. > -programming environment w/ interactive resident debugger That didn't come with the "regular" GeoWorks product. I suppose their must have been an SDK of some kind somewhere. > -office apps including word processor(with mail merge from the database), > spreadsheet(with charting), database, and page layout Sounds similar. The PC flavor came with GeoWrite (word processor/basic page layout), GeoCalc (spreadsheet), GeoDraw (vector graphics), GeoFile (database), and GeoComm (modem/terminal). And AOL. > And a bunch of other stuff. All in 64K, which > meant the kernel had to be _REALLY_ compact. Yah, that's way more impressive than even 640 KB. 64 KB is *tiny*. > http://lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/geos.html Neat. It's amazing they did all that on a C64! Heh, it even supported Klingon! :-D Hey, I found a page on PC/GEOS: http://www.geocities.com/originalravinray/geos/history_contents.html That backs up my claim that the AOL GUI was originally done by including the PC/GEOS core with AOL. It also mentions an early beta which included UI drivers (we'd call them "themes" today) for Motif, OpenLook, DeskMate, and IBM CUA. And, holy crap, there appears to be a company still maintaining and selling PC/GEOS! http://www.breadbox.com/ It doesn't look like the apps have changed much. I'm tempted to download the trial just to check it out. It was pretty fast even on my 8088; I can't imagine it would be slow in a VM on my Core 2 Duo. :-) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
