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Come on GEOS , now's your chance to shine as a replacement for Windows!

The 8086/286 memory management was actually quite elegant, in a twisted kind of way, and is best thought of as object oriented memory: a segment descriptor refers to an object, and you then indirect via an offset into that object. I once met a 286 Smalltalk implementation that used the 286 MMU like this. It worked rather well.

Of course, with 16-bit segment handles it totally fails to scale to modern systems, and it's completely incompatible with any modern coding practices.

The GEOS SDK is actually available as a free download (although I notice that some of the zipfile links with the documentation in it are broken. Sigh. It's available, you just have to hunt for it). That's the DOS-hosted version. To use the incomprehensible and bug-ridden debugger you'll need a second PC and a serial cable (or virtual versions thereof).

It would actually be interesting to see the source code. I suspect that far too much of it is written in 8086 assembler to be of any use these days, although quite a lot of the platform-specific bits could just be discarded --- block locking is irrelevant these days, for example. But I suspect it won't happen. GEOS had too much licensed third-party code in it...

(I got a job offer from Geoworks once. I turned them down. Probably a wise move.)

The list actually points out that you can still buy Breadbox Ensemble (the latest version of PC/GEOS,) and here's where you can buy it at: http://www.breadbox.com/ensemble/geosdetails.asp?id=45&category=Purchase%20Ensemble

This article makes me feel old.

Why? Because I remember when none of these OSes exist. When the world of computers was "open" and anyone could win. It was time of uncertainty AND excitement. In fact the #1 selling computers upto 1985 were the TRS-80 (70s), Atari 400/800(early 80s), and Commodore 64 (1983-). The Apple Macs and IBM PCs were not yet the dominant platforms they eventually became.

Aside:

PC/GEOS mentioned in the article originated on the Commodore 64 as a Mac-like clone OS. Apparently it's still being sold: http://www.breadbox.com/

Hey... try Breadbox Ensemble! It will revive any old PC! It is still in active development and may even have an application for you. http://www.breadbox.com/

Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?

I was going to say GEOS, which was an 8-bit GUI operating system on the C-64, but I figured out it is still around.

I remember thinking how cool it was because they wrote some really low level machine language routines that could detect when you opened and closed the 1541 floppy drive automatically, so instead of saying "Insert next disk and press Enter" like so many other programs of the time, it actually detected when you closed the drive door (engaged read/write heads) and automatically started reading from the 5.25" floppy disk. I guess you had to be there to see it, but it seemed impressive to me at the time.

I was going to say GEOS, but apparently that is still around in some form.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
http://www.breadbox.com/

Amazing.

They still soldier on: http://www.breadbox.com/

Heh... Windows killer in the 3.1 days, and MAYBE the 95 days, but that's it.

If you don't mind buying a $99 copy on floppy disks, http://www.breadbox.com/geocats.asp is NewDeal Office 2000 - the last version created by GeoWorks.

It's still in development by Breadbox Software, but they aren't selling their updated version, Breadbox Ensemble, to individuals. The trial's still available, though...

One very good option is Breadbox Ensemble. If you remember the old GeoWorks this is where it now lives. I have a very old 486 laptop that couldn't even run Win95 on it. I got Breadbox Ensemble running ontop of DOS 7.{whatever} and it's really nice.

Started out with Commodores. First a 64, then a 128. On which I ran, among other things, GEOS.

Then went to DOS on a '286 (which I was required to build as an incoming freshman at NJIT in the late '80s).

A year or two later, I got my hands on PC/GEOS, and ran that on top of DOS until 1993-1994, since it was object-oriented and multithreaded and pre-emptively multitasked in 1990. (Coincidentally, it used Objective-C...)

Around 1994 I managed to download Linux floppies and started using that. By 1997, I was running it on a laptop, a year later, my wife had a Linux laptop as well (and I must say, classically trained ballerinas who use vi make excellent wives).

2001 rolled around, and my laptop - a 486-75 - was getting pretty long in the tooth, so I started looking around for possible replacements. I wanted something that could play DVD's, which at that point on Linux was no minor thing.

I noticed Apple's dual USB iBooks. I noticed that if I wanted dual USB ports, FireWire, and 10/100 ethernet, built in, on the PC side of the fence, it would cost me an extra $500. This made my brain hurt, since as everyone knew, Apples were supposed to be more expensive. But I bought one anyway.

And then another. And then a Power Mac G5. And the one of the iBooks got lost at the repair depot and we got an iBook G4 as a replacement. And then I bought a PowerBook.

The Power Mac is for sale (I'm not home enough to make it worth having any more), and when it sells, I'll buy a Mac mini for my daughter. The older iBook is also going to be for sale soon, and when it sells, maybe another Mac mini to replace a 2000-vintage Dell laptop I've got running Linux as a home "server." Dunno.

I switched from Linux to Mac because the Mac "just worked." Getting it to play DVD's required, well, nothing. I didn't have to install WINE to run Office. And so on. (And I say this as someone who thought nothing of working with another person to figure out the X modelines for my wife's Linux laptop, as someone who thought nothing of buying a SCSI scanner and being the first to determine that yes, it did work with SANE, and so on - I'm not a technophobe.)

I've stuck with Macs because for the most part, they continue to "just work." I deal professionally with Windows 95, 98, NT 4 and XP, Red Hat 7 through 9, Solaris, SunOS 4, SCO OpenSewer on a 100-pound Dell, and things even more abominable. A PowerBook with OS X is a very nice counterpoint to the vast majority of the above. (Coincidentally, it uses Objective-C)

PC-GEOS didn't share anything in common with Commodore GEOS 64 / 128 or Apple GEOS except the name GEOS and the fact some of the same engineers worked on all of them. I did some work on Apple GEOS applications, and was part of the team that wrote PC-GEOS and its applications.

Microsoft hadn't yet dominated the desktop market when PC-GEOS came out. But pressure from Microsoft on OEMs (e.g., if you're going to bundle DOS, you have to pay for Windows even if you're not going to include it), plus bad marketing by Geoworks, and lack of an SDK in time doomed it for that market.

PC-GEOS was written from scratch. It used a generic UI, which was built out into a specific UI at runtime. Generic objects could build out into a single specific object (e.g., a button), an entire menu tree (e.g., all of the common File, Edit, View menus), or anything in between. This was the basis of one of Geoworks' patents. It made it very easy to get the basic functionality of an application up and running quickly. It also had an amazingly powerful text object, that was basically a word processor.

Because the generic to specific buildout happened at run time, these could be a lot more than superficial 'skins'. Unless you were designing for a handheld or other small device, no changes were required in the applications themselves to run under any of the UIs.

The first released UI was based on the Motif look-and-feel, but didn't use any Motif API. The original specific UI was based on OpenLook, but for a variety of reasons that wasn't used. There was also a CUA UI (think OS/2, much like Windows 3.0), a variety of OEM-specific UIs, a Deskmate UI for demo to Tandy Corp., and even a Macintosh UI for demo to Apple and Claris. NewDeal later added a "industry standard UI" (Win95 look-and-feel), and Breadbox a similar ISUI (Wind2000 look-and-feel).

Geoworks is now a corporate shell based in Texas. NewDeal is completely defunct. Breadbox currently owns the rights to PC-GEOS, and is alive and well. GEOS freeware, shareware, etc. live on at Tva Katter. (I maintain the TK site. There should be a ring over the 'a' in tva, but /. keeps eating it. The name is Swedish for 'two cats')

I can see why the Geoworks SDK was so bad.
Firstly Geoworks or GEOS/PC was based on Geos 64 however Geos 64 (unlike Windows) was not intended to be an operating system but an applications pacage. So originally Geos 64 was designed to have the apps develuped internally at Berkly this would most likely be passed over to Geoworks unless it was a white paper rewrite.

Geoworks was a very populare product with a problem. The market had already gone to Windows. While it made no sense at the time Microsoft had already gainned market domination.

Also Geoworks didn't have an SDK before version 2.0. As a result Geoworks had to rush the SDK develupment before Microsoft got market domination.

Geoworks also made the intresting choice of liccensing the MOTIF GUI. I always wondered if the infamous MOTIF API was found in Geoworks.. The problems you faced with it suggest the answer is yes.

Even with rushing the SDK to the market Geoworks was good and dead on the PC long before the Geoworks SDK was ready. The SDK remained for the Zoomer, Geobook and early smart cell phones.

But the Geoworks GUI was very nice. link Thanks to Toastytech for documenting the old Geoworks UI.

Ahh but Geoworks got a new life with "Newdeal" but they appear to be missing now.

A new reincarnation of Geoworks is Breadbox makes Breadbox Ensemble for sale and for trial you can use Ensemble lite. (Downloadable from Breadboxes website).

Breadbox has supported Geoworks back in the days of the Zoomer.

In my opinion the Geoworks SDK was a pig becouse Geoworks was doomed not the other way around.

I found the Apple 2 version here. As far as I can tell, this appears to be free, but unsupported.

Sorry, I messed up the link in that post. The link is http://www.breadbox.com/

Way back in days of yore, when Microsoft was still working out how to do overlapping windows, there was a company called Geoworks that produced a really nice office suite for the PC.

I won't go into details about it, but one of the really cool features was that each application had a tunable user interface. For example, you could set the word processor to user level #1 (novice) and it would turn into Windows Write: most of the controls went away, and you ended up with toolbar buttons for italic, bold, underline, etc, plus justification options; you got simple menus that let you pick things like the font and size directly; you got really, really basic page layout features --- I think it let you pick your paper size, and that was it.

OTOH, turn it up to level #4 (expert) and it turned into Word. There were controls everywhere. Hierarchical editable character and paragraph styles, embedded fields, hyperlinks, a full vector drawing package including rotatable text (also with hierarchical editable styles), a full bitmap drawing package, up to four seperate customisable toolbars, ruler and frame based layout, etc, etc.

And they used the same files.

So it was perfectly possible for Precocious Teenager to log in in expert mode, put together some pretty templates, and then Grandma could log in in novice mode and type text into them with simple formatting. Mum and Dad could use levels #2 or #3, which gave you more features without the overwhelming complexity that level #4 gave you.

It was such a startlingly good idea that I am not at all surprised no-one appears to have done anything similar.

(Hmm. You might still be able to download an evaluation copy here, but I suspect it's a pig to run on a NT-based Windows. Worth a look, though, if you want to be amazed at what it's possible to do on a 2MB real-mode DOS machine.)

If you'd like to do something more useful with an older system, check out GEOS. It's currently being maintained by Breadbox, who has a demo available for download. Full preemptive multitasking. Comes with a web browser (HTML 4.0, no CSS or JS), email (POP3), AIM, FTP, News Reader, and a roughly MS Works level office suite. More software is available from it at Tva Katter.

Older versions would run on an 8086 (one of the original design goals was that the WYSIWYG word processor could keep up with your typing on an 8086). The current version requires a 386. 2 megs of RAM should be fine for most things (even 1 will work ok), although you'd probably want at least 4 or 8 megs for browsing the web.

On this kind of machine, I'd just install DOS. I think you could get a lot more use out of it relative to the work you'd have to put in to getting Linux working on it much at all. I for one would skip Windows entirely. Win 3.1 is horrible on any hardware. ...but then again, maybe I am just being nostalgic because I cut my teeth as a youngster under DOS. I miss it somedays, feel like trading in this iBook for a 400 MHz or so PC for running DOS. :P There are still a fair amount of useful and fun software floating around for DOS. You could do MS-DOS 6.2 or FreeDOS. From what I've heard (but not positive) FreeDOS's comatability is pretty good.

Also, you could put OS/2 2.1 on it. If you're interested, I have the original box with manuals, along with 21 disks! Oh wait- that'll require a good 30 MB of HD space. But I did used to run it on a 486 sx/25 with 4 MB of RAM. It was a lot faster and more stable than Win 3.1 on the same machine. ;)

GEOS is quite nice. Again, ran it on a 386 SX and 486 SX with 4 MB of RAM. Ran pretty well. You can get a lot of software for it, relatively at least. Check out BreadBox. You can get web browsers, irc and AIM clients, games, etc. Download GeoWorks Ensemble for FREE! Quite nice- choose between a Win95 or Motif look! :) On the same download page, you can get an Infocom games interpreter as well! Best thing in the world for a 6-yo- helluva lot better than starting him on Doom!

If you're willing to spend some money, you could get Breadbox's New Deal Office- same core as Ensemble Lite, but with a lot of bundled apps. Pretty well done, runs on almost anything.

You could also run... MINIX!

On this kind of machine, I'd just install DOS. I think you could get a lot more use out of it relative to the work you'd have to put in to getting Linux working on it much at all. I for one would skip Windows entirely. Win 3.1 is horrible on any hardware. ...but then again, maybe I am just being nostalgic because I cut my teeth as a youngster under DOS. I miss it somedays, feel like trading in this iBook for a 400 MHz or so PC for running DOS. :P There are still a fair amount of useful and fun software floating around for DOS. You could do MS-DOS 6.2 or FreeDOS. From what I've heard (but not positive) FreeDOS's comatability is pretty good.

Also, you could put OS/2 2.1 on it. If you're interested, I have the original box with manuals, along with 21 disks! Oh wait- that'll require a good 30 MB of HD space. But I did used to run it on a 486 sx/25 with 4 MB of RAM. It was a lot faster and more stable than Win 3.1 on the same machine. ;)

GEOS is quite nice. Again, ran it on a 386 SX and 486 SX with 4 MB of RAM. Ran pretty well. You can get a lot of software for it, relatively at least. Check out BreadBox. You can get web browsers, irc and AIM clients, games, etc. Download GeoWorks Ensemble for FREE! Quite nice- choose between a Win95 or Motif look! :) On the same download page, you can get an Infocom games interpreter as well! Best thing in the world for a 6-yo- helluva lot better than starting him on Doom!

If you're willing to spend some money, you could get Breadbox's New Deal Office- same core as Ensemble Lite, but with a lot of bundled apps. Pretty well done, runs on almost anything.

You could also run... MINIX!

I have often thought that this kind of thing would be a great application for GeosWorks Ensemble -- if the price was right.
Sadly, I don't see this being free any time soon.
Twelve diskettes, $80.
New Deal -- Office
Maybe get them as a sponsor and license for a dollar a box? They might get new revenue from the add-ons (most $20 ea.) they sell and you would be doing all work and eating the real expenses (cost of the floppies).

I have often thought that this kind of thing would be a great application for GeosWorks Ensemble -- if the price was right.
Sadly, I don't see this being free any time soon.
Twelve diskettes, $80.
New Deal -- Office
Maybe get them as a sponsor and license for a dollar a box? They might get new revenue from the add-ons (most $20 ea.) they sell and you would be doing all work and eating the real expenses (cost of the floppies).

A demo version of GEOS, aka PC-GEOS, is available here. The original version was created by the same people who made Commodore GEOS over at (the soon to be defunct) Geoworks. My co-op project back in '89 was done on GeoProgrammer, as part of in-house testing for that environment.

You can still try it out, there's a demo/light version at Breadbox.

Once known as GeOS, is still available from www.breadbox.com.

It's pretty good, and gets good performance out of a 386, particularly if intercompatiblity isn't a worry.

Available from Breadbox Computing. (They call it New Deal Office 2000.)

It's an operating systemish thing that runs on top of DOS. What you get is a complete Windows-like operating environment with virtual memory, long filenames, threads, outline fonts, WYSIWYG word processor, drawing package, database, spreadsheet, loads of applications, basic web browser, email, PPP, etc. It runs in bugger all memory. Minimum useful spec is a 386 with 4MB and 20MB or so of hard disk space, but it'll run on a 286 and up with 640kB or RAM (but it won't be pleasant). All the applications can deal with documents too big to fit in memory.

It is, unfortunately, payware. But it's 100 USD, it's a complete integrated solution containing everything from high-level apps to printer drivers, it's easy to use --- the user interfaces are all customisable; for experts you can rearrange the toolbars, for newbies you can turn most of the buttons and menus off to make something dead simple --- it's an excellent choice for low-end systems. It'll run like a storm on your machine.

(I did my fourth-year project writeup at university on it. 300 pages in a single document. No problem whatsoever. The built-in word processor is a hell of a lot more flexible and powerful than a lot of commercial products I've seen. For ease of use it beats Word into a cocked hat, and it's got most of the useful features --- frame-based text flowing, built-in vector drawing tools, built-in bitmap drawing tools, rotatable & transformable & editable text, wrapping text around graphics, spelling checker and thesaurus, hierarchical paragraph styles...)

You will have to support them, including installing it on the empty machine. However, they'll need much less support than Windows or, heaven forbid, Unix will. It won't run Windows apps, which is a plus. It will run third-party GEOS apps, but you probably don't want them to.

It's ideally suited for a turnkey system, which I think is what you want here.

Available from Breadbox Computing. (They call it New Deal Office 2000.)

It's an operating systemish thing that runs on top of DOS. What you get is a complete Windows-like operating environment with virtual memory, long filenames, threads, outline fonts, WYSIWYG word processor, drawing package, database, spreadsheet, loads of applications, basic web browser, email, PPP, etc. It runs in bugger all memory. Minimum useful spec is a 386 with 4MB and 20MB or so of hard disk space, but it'll run on a 286 and up with 640kB or RAM (but it won't be pleasant). All the applications can deal with documents too big to fit in memory.

It is, unfortunately, payware. But it's 100 USD, it's a complete integrated solution containing everything from high-level apps to printer drivers, it's easy to use --- the user interfaces are all customisable; for experts you can rearrange the toolbars, for newbies you can turn most of the buttons and menus off to make something dead simple --- it's an excellent choice for low-end systems. It'll run like a storm on your machine.

(I did my fourth-year project writeup at university on it. 300 pages in a single document. No problem whatsoever. The built-in word processor is a hell of a lot more flexible and powerful than a lot of commercial products I've seen. For ease of use it beats Word into a cocked hat, and it's got most of the useful features --- frame-based text flowing, built-in vector drawing tools, built-in bitmap drawing tools, rotatable & transformable & editable text, wrapping text around graphics, spelling checker and thesaurus, hierarchical paragraph styles...)

You will have to support them, including installing it on the empty machine. However, they'll need much less support than Windows or, heaven forbid, Unix will. It won't run Windows apps, which is a plus. It will run third-party GEOS apps, but you probably don't want them to.

It's ideally suited for a turnkey system, which I think is what you want here.

Hardware Requirements

* Minimum 386 IBM compatible computer or better
* 640k minimum RAM (2-4Mb or more recommended)
* 15Mb free hard disk space
* EGA, VGA, Super VGA
* Mouse (optional/recommended)