The History of GeoWorks, Microsoft Windows’ Upstart ’90s Competitor (2016)

I was blown away by Geoworks. Using a 25MHz 286 felt like a power machine. I remember printing a page with a Giant lower case e on it to see if it scaled it up to full page nicely. It printed two pages. The second just had a tiny triangle of black on it. Looking at my document I saw the end of the e had just clipped past the edge of the page.<p>At the time WYSIWYG was a bullet point promise that never delivered. Seeing it actually happen was amazing. That it was in a product that had the feel of &quot;Of course it does it that way, because that&#x27;s how it should be done&quot;<p>I often lament that it was never an Open Source project. It got passed around companies looking to use it in some niche or other while it slowly decayed. It had enough enthusiasts that as an open project it would have developed.

I (briefly) had to write code to run on GeoWorks GEOS. The code was written in a dialect of C with object oriented features that was compiled from .goc and .goh files to .c files in a manner similar to cfront. It was not a pleasant experience.<p>Edit: This was in 1997. We were writing a web browser for the Brother Geobook which was a device with late 90s PDA capabilities in the form factor of a late 90s laptop. I don&#x27;t think that it was a particularly successful product.

Steve Yegge had an interesting take on what it was like to work at GeoWorks:<p>&gt; OK: I went to the University of Washington and [then] I got hired by this company called Geoworks, doing assembly-language programming, and I did it for five years. To us, the Geoworkers, we wrote a whole operating system, the libraries, drivers, apps, you know: a desktop operating system in assembly. 8086 assembly! It wasn&#x27;t even good assembly! We had four registers! [Plus the] si [register] if you counted, you know, if you counted 386, right? It was horrible.<p>&gt; I mean, actually we kind of liked it. It was Object-Oriented Assembly. It&#x27;s amazing what you can talk yourself into liking, which is the real irony of all this. And to us, C++ was the ultimate in Roman decadence. I mean, it was equivalent to going and vomiting so you could eat more. They had IF! We had jump CX zero! Right? They had &quot;Objects&quot;. Well we did too, but I mean they had syntax for it, right? I mean it was all just such weeniness. And we knew that we could outperform any compiler out there because at the time, we could!<p>&gt; So what happened? Well, they went bankrupt. Why? Now I&#x27;m probably disagreeing – I know for a fact that I&#x27;m disagreeing with every Geoworker out there. I&#x27;m the only one that holds this belief. But it&#x27;s because we wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good tools, world class tools: trust me, you need &#x27;em. But at some point, man...<p>&gt; The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain&#x27;t gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he&#x27;s going off this way, right?<p>&gt; This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it&#x27;s like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn&#x27;t just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.<p>&gt; Because we couldn&#x27;t see how the system worked anymore!<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;05&#x2F;dynamic-languages-strike-back.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;05&#x2F;dynamic-languages-st...</a>

I loved Geoworks. It did things on my 386 that Windows 3.1 had no hope of doing ever (like loading and working). Also, the banner program wasn&#x27;t just useful with dot-matrix printers. I had an inkjet and remember many birthdays printing out banners for my family (we used Scotch tape to put them together). Good times.

Back in those days, Windows had an absolute lock on the industry for several reasons:<p>1: it was the incumbent<p>2: there were no hardware drivers for any other operating system<p>3: there was software for Microsoft operating systems, and no useful software for any other OS<p>4: Microsoft has legal contracts with the hardware manufacturers which required that a icense fee be paid regardless of whether or not Windows shipped with each machine.<p>5: probably more reasons<p>As an outcome of the above it turned out to be impossible for any other OS to get a foothold on the PC. It&#x27;s hgard for people to understand now, but there was still an opening for some other OS to get a foothold.<p>In the end, another OS turned up and started making major headway on the PC. It succeeded against Windows in the way that such battles tend to be played out - by playing to a different set of rules. That OS of course was Linux and its rules were to be free, to have a collaborative development model, to be server focused, and to have the fortunate timing of being at the start of the era of connected computing. I remember being startled that I could get a free operating system by buying an issue of a computer magazine at the newsagent with a CDROM on the front containing Linux.<p>Eventually the seemingly impossible happened and an OS came along that beat Microsoft on the desktop, or at least competed effectively with Microsoft Windows - and that of course was OSX. And OSX against succeeded by playing to its own rules. No need for hardware drivers for every device under the sun because they it only ran on Apple hardware. It had applications from the Macintosh user base (and Microsoft), and turned out to be a really nicely integrated and functional OS (IMO).<p>Its a pity GEOS didn&#x27;t make headway, at the time I really wanted SOMETHING, ANYTHING to give Microsoft effective competition because it looked back then like it was going to be 1,000 years of Microsoft in first place with no second, third or fourth place runners up.<p>BeOS also gets points for having a try at competing with Microsoft.

GeoWorks was pretty cool on the 386 but GEOS on the Commodore 64 was just unreal -- it was slow and required some tedious disk swapping but even the idea of selectable, proportional fonts at different font sizes among its many other features was amazing on a 1MHz CPU, 64k RAM system.

I remember running geoworks on an 8086 with 1MB of ram. ran reasonably well and came with the proto AOL (for some reason I thought it came with a Quantum Link client that looked like an AOL client, but according to wikipedia Quantum Link was already renamed to AOL at this time).<p>It was a pretty amazing piece of code that made that 8086 very usable for a few more years.

I used GEOS often on my C64 as a child. It was my first experience with a graphical desktop interface and seamlessly segued into the Amiga, for me.<p>I recall the paint program, with its textured fills, and all the simple bitmap tools everyone is familiar with today in MS Paint. The word processing app, really more like desktop publishing. The general file management and window system...<p>It seems all rather forward thinking for 1986. It seems like the concepts for most of our software tends to be around for long before we have the technology to do it properly. All the pre-internet machines I had later just did what my Commodore 64 and GEOS did, but faster and with more colors.

When I was an undergrad in the CS dept at U.C. Berkeley (88-92), Geoworks is where &gt;everyone&lt; wanted to work.

I used GeoWorks for serious work in 1994, because the place I was working was too stingy to spring for a Windows 3.1 licence. Fabulously easy to use, and crashed at the drop of a hat losing all unsaved work ... frickin&#x27; Win3.1 <i>WordPad</i> would have been superior, certainly in stability at least ...

By the early 90s pc clones were much cheaper than $2K and I&#x27;d reckon OS&#x2F;2 was a much bigger competitor to Windows than GEOS.

&gt; That computer wasn’t super-fast—what, with its 40-megabyte hard drive and one megabyte of RAM—and, as a result, it really benefited from the lightweight, object-oriented approach of GeoWorks.<p>…am I the only one that made a double-take at this? I don&#x27;t associate OOP with being lightweight. It&#x27;s either oxymoronic or irrelevant.

I remember reading about (or at least seeing cool looking ads) for GeoWorks, DESQview (and DESQview&#x2F;X!), and GEM in magazines like Byte in the early 90s. I was always sad that I never got to try out any of them on my machine.

I loved GEOS too, used it on my C64. It was probably black magic that they got it to run so well on there.

Used to swear by my HP OmniGo 100.