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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I used GEOS on the c64 and it was a pile of crap.
Clunky looking, and downright slow, especially when you had to insert disk 'A', then insert disk 'B', then insert disk 'A' again etc. You get the picture!
With two or more floppies plus a ram expansion unit, it was bearable, but only just.
But at the time, it was the only GUI OS for the C64.
PC-GEOS on the other hand blew me away. It was stable and fast, and looked gorgeous. Even now it looks ok.
It literally did print WYSIWYG on my dot-matrix printers.
PC-GEOS 1.0 had extremely fast screen displays, but the 2.x series was quite slow for some reason.
I think in PC-GEOS 2.x they used a lot of object-orientated code which was the culprit.
For two years, I did a monthly newsletter for my mother's nursing home, complete with scanned photos and interviews.
I also published several hundred copies of my grandmother's poems using this OS.
PC-GEOS was SO easy to use. I did everything in it except program for it.
Geoworks had a brain-dead sheme whereby you had to apply to become a developer.
WTF, you say? It's true.
If you were accepted, you were then permitted to buy the SDK for about AUS $200, and develop progs.
A proficient developer in ASM and C, I was told by the Australian distributor, I wouldn't be accepted as a developer, since I had no C++ experience!
I was currently learning it, but he said it wasn't good enough, they only wanted experienced C++ devs!
So I said FSCK YOU, and left PC-GEOS for Dr-DOS/Win 3.1
It serves the b*stards right for being so choosy.
When you are a small OS struggling for market share, you don't knock back anyone, who wants to develop apps for you.
You also need to give away the SDK for free.