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GEOS Available for Download After 18 Years
gp writes "Back in 1986, Berkeley Softworks presented GEOS,
the Graphical Environment Operating System for the Commodore 64 (screenshots). GEOS
effectively turned the 8-bit Commodore 64 into something very similar to a
Macintosh, but for an 8th of the price. In 2004, pushed hard by
rivaling C64 open source alternatives such as the Contiki operating system and
desktop environment and the LUnix *nix clone, the owners of
GEOS have finally decided to release GEOS to the public. Hordes of
Commodore 64 users are expected to download the system." Sadly, there's no mention of GEOS for the Apple 2 series of computers, which also enjoyed this fine precursor of GUIs to come.
Anyone who's got a CatWeasel MK3 card in a Windows PC should visit Jens' site and get the skinny on Arjuna. I got it running last weekend and I've written a few C64 disks using a normal 1.2MB floppy drive. Should help get GEOS onto a real C64. Now I just need GEOS drivers and software for the RR-Net cart. Not that Contiki isn't good too, but it would be really nice if the extra RAM in the Retro Replay cart was used to improve the web browser.
(Or if you've got an RR-Net cart and you're lucky enough to have the Web Downloader working, you can setup a local web server on your PC and transfer a .D64 disk image onto a disk that way.)
I remember using a joystick to navigate the UI, since mice were a bit of a rarity. Plus, GeoWrite actually had fonts to choose from, and they looked great on the trusty old dot-matrix (or 'impact printer', if you will...)
I am Jack's witty signature line
Here's a start:
http://sta.c64.org/xcables.html.
Note: I tried making a cable to run off my PC's parallel port a couple of years ago, and it never worked. It's not as simple as it looks.
For those too lazy to read, it boils down to this: You cannot read or write a disk formatted for a Commodore drive on a PC, and the same is true for a PC-formatted disk in a Commodore drive. They use entirely different formats to write to the disk, it's not just a matter of a different filesystem. The above link allows one (in theory) to build a parallel1541 (one of the most common Commodore disk drives) interface, and some PC software to handle the data transfer.
Either way, this is still pretty neat if just for (legit) emulator use. I remember GEOS when it first came out, and as annoying as it was, I saw pretty quick that this was the future for all home computing. It took me until the early 90s before I saw anything like this on the PC (Macs have always been too pricey for my tastes).
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The Apple II version was released 6 months ago. as announced on a2central.com
You're thinking of two different products. What has been released, as I understand it, is the source code for GEOS 1.0 for the C64. Awesome little machine, with an even more awesome GUI that ran off of floppies. (Back in my day we didn't have hard drives, and we liked it!) Very powerful, very stable, especially when you consider it had a whole 64 KILObytes of RAM and ONE Megahertz to play with. They had a trash can concept long before Apple even thought of it.
You're thinking of GeoWorks Ensemble, based on the GEOS 2.0 kernel, which ran on the PC. It was a contemporary of Windows 3.0, and every review at the time said that it wiped the floor with Microsoft's baby. Of course, the company had zero marketing skill while Microsoft, well, we know their marketing strategy. So Windows won and GEOS, which I still consider to be one of the best idiot-friendly interfaces ever created, eventually petered out.
It's last gasp was on the Casio Z-7000 Zoomer handhelds. They were released right after the original Apple Newton (the Newton beat them by about 3 months), and wasa joint coventure between Casio (hardware), GeoWorks (OS), and a little startup company run by Jeff Hawkins and Dona Dubinsky called "Palm Computing". While the Z-7000 was a market flop, along with the original Newton, it was from the mistakes there that Hawkins and company learned how to make a handheld the right way, and so was born the Palm Pilot.
There was also an attempt at a GEOS 3.0-based handheld, or more accurately a "tablet PC", called the Sharp PT-9000. It ran all of the same apps as the desktop GeoWorks and used the exact same data file format, and used a very tablet PC-esque form factor and design as far back as 1995-1996. Unfortunately, Sharp for unknown reasons killed the project at the last minute, and it was never produced outside of beta units within the company itself. Once again, GEOS beat Microsoft to the punch, by nearly a decade this time, but it just didn't work out for whatever reason.
(I have a used Z-7000 I bought off eBay for nostalgia, but never did get my hands on a PT-9000.)
Except for really hard core hackers with old C64s, this is not really major news. Still, it's a nice trip down memory lane.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
I haven't done this yet, but I would imagine that you could create .D64 files (disk images), and use them.
However, it's hard to say whether or not this would work with an emulator or not. GEOS used fast-disk routines that ran in the drive memory of the 1541/1571/1581 drives, and if the emulator can't emulate the CPU in the drive (6502 in the 1541) and the 6510 in the C64 with 100% cycle exactness, then you'll have some problems.
-- Joe
Actually, the autoloading was usually done by machine language programs. The typical way to do it would be to write a small stub program in machine language that loaded into memory space near the I/O vectors (the cassette buffer and a small little area at $02A7 were favorites). As part of that program you would actually save a copy of the vectors, and set the load address of your executable to be that of the vectors.
When your program loaded, you overwrote the vectors, and one of them controlled where program execution went after a load.
It's been a long time since I've done that, so the exact details in my mind are hazy. But that's how some of the simple autoloaders were done.
-- Joe
They had a trash can concept long before Apple even thought of it.
GEOS: 1986
Apple Macintosh: 1984 (trash can from day one)
Apple Lisa: 1983 (okay, so it was called WasteBasket)
In what crazy universe does that qualify as "long before Apple even thought of it"?
Yes, New Deal went out of business. About 3 years ago cash was running low, and they signed a contract to get funding from investors. However, the money never showed up, so the company went under.
New Deal charged about $80, which included the operating system, the office suite, and a bunch of internet applications. If that's not worth $80, then you're just really damn cheap.
The last version to be officially released was a bit of a pain to get on the internet, as it didn't have a dialler application, and the ethernet support didn't work on a lot of networks. The next release had those issues fixed, but the company ran out of money right before going into production.
The only reason they ever "beat themselves to death" knocking over to track zero was because of the "awful copy protection" schemes and "fancy loaders". If used as designed, the 1541 didn't knock all that much. So, yes they did go out of alignment sometimes, but it wasn't so much due to bad design, as due to abuse. I did use two 1541s heavily for about 10 years (fancy loaders, copy "protection", nibblers, and all) without an alignment problem though.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I used to work in a computer repair shop in the early 90s, when we were just catching the tail end of the 8-bit computers (I can still diagnose all the ZX Spectrum "stock faults" with a two-second look at the screen). We had a 1541 alignment disk, that had the "boot" tracks written really "hot" so even very badly out-of-alignment drives would read them, then tracks that started off deliberately too far out, worked their way to perfect alignment, and eventually were too far in, across the surface of the disk. What happened was, it would boot off the disk, then start reading the "test" tracks until it found the track where it got the least CRC errors. Then it would smack the head off the end stop a few times, and try reading the disk again. Painful to listen to, and took all night (I feel sorry for the people in the flat above the shop), but it *always* worked. Second thing to try after a headcleaner.
You're thinking of Geoworks Ensemble. It came bundled with a number of Magnavox 8086 through 80386 machines back in the late 80's / early 90's. It did everything windows 3.1 did, except: 1. Crash every 30-60 seconds 2. Run more than the 30 or so apps that came with the distro. Still, a good, solid windowing system for low-end hardware.
g ory=Ease-of-Use
The GeoWorks of old can be found at Home Of the Underdogs. A newer incarnation, updated for newer hardware and the Web is called Breadbox Ensemble, and is viewable here: http://www.breadbox.com/ensemble/geocats.asp?cate
Not exactly. Q-Link (AOL before it was AOL) was released with GEOS, but did not run in GEOS. Q-Link ran native on the C-64.
Hordes of Commodore 64 users are expected to download the system.
Does anyone still use the Commodore 64 for anything serious? At best I would assume that it would be used as a gaming platform for people obsessed with the simple games for the Commodore that were released twenty years ago.
Or it would be used as an extended embedded system with a composite video (television) but no need for extensive disk storage.
I was one of the Commodore 64's biggest fans. But even I switched to MS-DOS and IBM PC in the late 1980's. With ten-year old 286 and 386 laptops selling for $50, why would anyone want to spend time developing and using a Commodore 64 now?