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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As I recall, all development for version 1.x of the GEOS OS had to be done on a Sun SparcStation, which made becoming a GEOS developer even MORE daunting (and unaffordable). At least the SDK and machine requirements for v2 were a BIT more affordable... $100 for the SDK... but it then required a fairly-leading-edge machine, I believe, running WinNT (v3.x, I think... but possibly v2.x) with the Borland "C" compiler PLUS a second, thankfully lesser, machine to debug on.
I HAVE a couple of copies of the SDK somewhere... probably the required Borland C... but no NT. Oh, well.
BTW, for anyone who might remember me... I was cmsallek/ fidogeomod on aol and was the moderator of the Fidonet Geoworks echo about 8 years ago, I think. (Has it been THAT long?) I wander in and out of the Yahoo Geoworks group (geos-talk) & tried to keep up with comp.os.geos.misc. I even popped on irc.breadbox.com once or twice.
I should be ordering the GreenPC version of GEOS/NewDeal Ensemble from Breadbox sometime soon, along with Breadbox Ensemble, the LATEST version of what WAS Geoworks Ensemble, sometime in the NEAR future.
I STILL love that OS/GUI and it's software... I remember downloading my FIRST GEOS app from a BBS... the download was so QUICK because of the app's small size... I figured that there had been an error... but no... there was the app and it ran just fine.
And oh, the FEATURES... open-pinnable menus, text OBJECTS,
lightning fast PREEMPTIVE multitasking, FANTASTIC output on my inexpensive dot-matrix printer... it was SO MUCH FUN on
a 286 and later a 486.
Back to those app sizes... the SDK came with example code for a small word processor... think "Wordpad" without the help (heck, help was not usually NEEDED with GEOS apps). I think the WP example code is something like 50k.
I also bought a copy of the "Overview", an introduction to the "guts" of GEOS... and remember being FLOORED by some of the things that had been put in or allowed for in the OS. BTW, from what I always understood... GEOS was basically a TRUE OS... the only reason you had to load DOS first was for the file system... unlike WINv3, etc., which was merely a GUI interface for the DOS command line (think PRETTY DosHell... err... DOSshell).
Finally, there was supposedly a handful of people who, by eliminating unneeded libraries, apps, etc., managed to squeeze a stripped-down, BOOTABLE version of Geoworks Ensemble (basic DOS, GEOS kernal and required libraries, etc.), I believe WITH GeoWrite, the GeoWorks word processor, but probably excluding the thesaurus and possibly spell-check, onto a SINGLE 1.44mB floppy. (This was a v1.x Ensemble, I believe... and probably DOSv3.2 or so.)