PC GEOS had no future because it was written in object-oriented 8086 assembly language. This made it very small and efficient but effectively tied it to that 16bit platform. When PCs moved to 32bit and protected mode with the 386 there was no hope for GEOS.<p>It continued to find a niche in handheld PDAs running x86 processors (I had one, the HP OmniGo) but even those types of computers eventually moved to 32bit ARM.
In the early 90s, Geoworks Ensemble filtered through my local teenager PC scene. The more curious among us tried it out. The experience was smooth and polished enough, and just different enough, that we went back a few times. Running Geoworks for weeks at a time.<p>But ultimately the system was relatively closed and limiting, there was nowhere to go with it once you got sick of the range it offered. From the perspective of young home enthusiasts at the time, anyway.<p>Meanwhile DOS (and even Windows) -based development was undergoing a period of extremely rapid iterative changes and extensions. It was impossible to stay away from that for long. It's where all the action was.
It was miraculous what you could do with GEOS on the Commodore 64. I did a lot of school projects, such as papers and newsletters. With lots of fonts and graphics.
I wonder why so many of these earlier GUIs didn't seem to have gotten typography right?<p>I remember Geoworks looking cool, but the typography was not great.<p>Even worse were Apple Mac inspired GUIs like Digital Research's GEM Desktop. (which was the default interface in Ventura Publisher)<p><a href="https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x" rel="nofollow">https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x</a><p>Amiga Workbench despite being ahead of its time, had poor typography<p><a href="https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/workbench/workbench-1-2/" rel="nofollow">https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/work...</a><p>Compare that to Apple System 6<p><a href="https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-0-6/system-6x" rel="nofollow">https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-0-6/system-6x</a><p>The only environment that came close to having decent typography (apart from Windows and OS/2) was DesqviewX but I don't know if I knew anyone who ran it.<p><a href="https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x" rel="nofollow">https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x</a>
I used GeoWorks on my used IBM PS/2 286 PC in like 1992. It ran off a single AOL floppy. It was honestly amazing to see my "ancient" DOS based computer suddenly displaying a Windows-like GUI. It really seemed like magic. It was also pretty much the only time I used a mouse on that machine, since everything else was DOS.
>But the best part of GeoWorks was the fact that it worked well without really strong hardware. Windows 3.1 really needed a 486 to shine, but GeoWorks could effectively run on a 286 or 386 without any problem.<p>My first install of Slackware 30 years ago was on 386DX33 with 2M RAM. The X felt fast and responsive, especially compare to the Windows. The only thing i saw missing then in Linux preventing me from pushing it to our customers is that typical business software of the day didn't work on it. Well, several years later, like Oracle release in 98, the things changed, and that seems to have sealed the fate of the high-tech world for the foreseeable future.
Philips used to ship GeoWorks on their PCs back in the early 1990's, at least in what concerns their products being sold in Portugal.<p>A mate used to talk how much better using GeoWorks than us stuck on Amigas and PCs with Windows 3.x...
PC GEOS is now Apache 2 FOSS.<p><a href="https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos">https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos</a>
Some previous discussion & anecdotes:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609</a>
I distinctly remember a PC magazine article about a later release of GeoWorks. It gushed about how it could play full motion video (probably only 256 pixels wide, if that) while running other applications. The screenshot showed a clip from Star Trek IV. Kind of laughable by modern standards, but it was an impressive technical feat at the time.