That PC GEOS page is cool... but I'm still slightly bitter they abandoned my poor little C64 back in the day.
-sc > -----Original Message----- > From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2009 1:00 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: Re: [OT][Humor] AOL > > 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/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
