Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 3rd Oct 2002 22:12 UTC
It is always an honour to interview people who have 'served' and worked on operating systems at the "golden" times of the operating systems, the '80s and pre-Win9x days. Today we interview Adam de Boor, who was the CTO at GeoWorks, developers of the GEOS, in the begining of the last decade. Adam today works for OpenWave Systems. We discuss about GeoWorks, its past, its future, where it should have been.
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Thanks, great interview. I too used GEOS on the C64 (in cartridge form) and later Geoworks on a 286 PC, or rather, I used it on my father's PC to print my name with the bundled banner print application ;-). Geoworks was among the first consumer software to use decent vector fonts, and that impressed the hell out of me at the time, because you could make these banners REALLY BIG and they would still look nice.
Like pretty much everyone else we eventually switched to Windows 3.*, which was extremely slow in comparison, but there was no other choice: As Adam correctly points out, you could more conveniently run the old DOS apps, and Geoworks itself had only really a handful of graphical apps, while Windows was quickly becoming the world standard. If Geoworks should teach us one lesson, it is this: If you don't support developers for your platform, your platform will die. Nevertheless, Microsoft already had those nasty OEM contracts in place which made it pretty hard for PC sellers to put anything but DOS/Windows on their machine. (In fact, they were even nastier than today, because the antitrust rulings had not taken place yet.) This is, after all, what killed BeOS years later in spite of reasonable dev support.
Today I'm using Linux and quite happy with it, in spite of its shortcomings (*cough* X11 *cough*). The number of free applications available is simply amazing, and many of them are extremely powerful as well. It's sad that Microsoft ruled supreme over the last decades (in spite of better solutions like Geoworks, OS/2, and BeOS), but I'm confident that this rule will come to an abrupt end in the near future. What I'd love to see is for a team like the Geoworks guys to come together and create a consumer Linux distro. Perhaps Xandros will be like that.