“Based on an operating system called GEOS that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Breadbox Ensemble is a small (a full installation weighs in at under 10 MB) and fast suite of incredibly useful programs. While small, Breadbox Ensemble has a graphical user interface that mimics the look and feel of the Windows desktop.” Read more…
I’ve got a low-end compaq notebook (1.6 gb harddrive, 48 mb ram) I bought in 1996 running xfce, epiphany, abiword, emacs, and it works great. This is the way to go IMHO.
I’d never tried XFCE before. Saw this and loaded it up on Ubuntu. Pleasantly surprised at its maturity — and, yes, it’s quite efficient. Thanks.
Windowmaker and a light file manager, xfm or even rox for instance, is also pretty good. Faster and less demands on the system than xfce. I think its far and away the best of the minimalist desktops/window managers. Great for ordinary non technical people who just want the OS to stay out of the way and let them use a few standard apps. If you do it, make sure to get the gui config tools as well.
Breadbox Ensemble is not available for purchase by individuals at this time. For retail purchase of comparable Geos desktop software, please click on the E-Store link above, then click on the NewDeal2000 link at the bottom of the page for additional information and to order.
Bummer
Personally there’s still one small problem,windows still plays a significant role.
Windows plays no role. It does require DOS, but all Breadbox really needs is a “sys c:” on the drive. It actually uses a lot less of DOS than Windows 9x did.
GEOS used to be the best OE for x86 hands down. A lot of the features it had in the very early 90’s didn’t show up in Windows until WIndows 95 or even 98, and some of the features in it’s office suite took until Office 97 to be duplicated. Still, it’s horribly outdated.
The best thing breadbox could do is to open source this product, and hope that some developers had some real interest in taking GEOS into to the 21st century – like 32 or 64 bit processing, or being able to process more than 256 colors. The biggest problem is it’s API – it’s a lot more difficult to program for than other OSes.
Geos and Geoworks Ensemble was written in Assembly language, a skill that has almost become a black art due to its complexity and lack of popularity. So I don’t think Open Sourcing it is going to help it all that much.
As someone who used Geos in the past on a Tandy 1000 SX and an Epson 286, it worked rather well given the limitations of hardware resources of the time. Unfortunately I don’t agree, I think it is an idea that has came and went.
I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that programming in assembly is a “black art,” but the “popularity” in the sense that extending a non-portable fringe project is not going to be all that appealing to the stray programmer would certainly be an issue. The overall popularity of programming some assembly, though, is easily greater than programming in Haskell.
Windows plays no role. It does require DOS, but all Breadbox really needs is a “sys c:” on the drive. It actually uses a lot less of DOS than Windows 9x did.
GEOS uses DOS for one reason: filesystem support. It will use thinks like DOS mouse drivers and memory drivers if you load them, but they are completely unnecessary.
The best thing breadbox could do is to open source this product, and hope that some developers had some real interest in taking GEOS into to the 21st century – like 32 or 64 bit processing, or being able to process more than 256 colors.
Open sourcing the code wouldn’t really do anything. The people who know the code well enough to really do something significant with it aren’t interested anymore. More importantly, you’re talking about a half gigabyte tree of source code, almost entirely written in 8086 assembly code. The code was never moved to 32 bit before because you’d have to rewrite the vast majority of it in the process. Hand written assembly was great for their goal of running well on an XT, but horrible for making any major changes to system.
Last I heard, the kernel was rewritten to run under a DOS extender, but still in 16 bit mode. This eliminated the memory issues with the internet apps, but obviously wasn’t a long term solution. Also, no one rewrote the VM scrub thread, which means memory allocations that were no longer needed were never being freed. The kernel would eventually run out of handles to allocate resources and would crash. From what I hear, this meant the web browser ran blazingly fast, but could only load about half a dozen web pages before the system ran out of resources.
Also, the system was capable of handling 24bit color. The only limitation was the UI color scheme was limited to 256 colors. Your default widget colors were limited to 256 colors, but that’s the only thing limited. Even that wasn’t that big a limitation. I had made a plan to remove that limit right before New Deal ran out of money, but never implemented it…
The biggest problem is it’s API – it’s a lot more difficult to program for than other OSes.
Quite the contrary. The API is excellent. The problem is the 16 bit memory management. Not being able to alloc more than 64k sucked, but that was a limitation imposed by the hardware available at the time the API was designed. Any UI related API was excellent – far better than any other UI API I’ve seen. I’ve long been tempted to reimplement the GEOS UI API on top of X or Win32, but it’s a massive project and I don’t have the time.
breadbox is based on dos
would beos feel faster and more responsive?
I still have GeoWorks in storage. Was a good OS back in the day. Kinda miss the Clown game it had. My dad purchaled Breadbox’s repack a while ago and runs it on his older machines and likes it fine. Still an amazing bundle for the older boxes to this day.
Ran GEOS128 on my good ol’ C-128D (with built in 5.25 ” disk drive). Looking back I’m amazed they had it running in 128K, WYSIWYG word processor and all that. It was slow as hell, but still more stable than Win 3.1 at the time. Never got a chance to run the PC version though.
Actually GEOS 128 is relatively fast even by today’s standards if you’ve got (at least) an REU. If you have extra hardware like a SuperCPU 128 and/or RAMLink, it can be blazingly fast for basic home/office apps.
True, GEOS 128 on a C128D with even modest extra RAM runs at an acceptable speed. I’d say the C128D with a 2MB REU was the pinnacle of 8-bit computing; it had multiple processors (one per drive plus two on the main machine), a GPU with dedicated memory, and a really accessible programming interface. The already mentioned SuperCPU 128 with GEOS 128 2.0 (or better yet Wheels 128) is amazingly fast, but AFAIR it’s actually a hybrid 8-bit / 16-bit system.
If your need are small and simple, keep your old PC, run Windows95 and Office 95 and you’ll be happy.
I know both are not longer supported by Microsoft, but who care? It’s for your old PC…
At least you’ll stay compatible with the rest of the world…
OR : Keep your old PC, install a nice Linux distro, try to use something lighter than KDE or Gnome if the PC has limited resources. Get OpenOffice and you’re done!
As far as your note on using Windows 95 and Office 95 goes I don’t think that would do much to maintain compatibility on modern systems. You would probably be able to import Office 95 files in a newer version, but I think saving from a newer version of Office wouldn’t have very good results since like any office suite it will provide you with access to all the features from the latest version and then tell you when saving that some of the formatting will be lost if you chose to save in the equivalent Office 95 format.
It’s still an idea, but Windows 95 hasn’t had security updates in a very long time. Modern firewall software running on an old machine might not burden the processor too much, but modern AV software will.
Personally I’d go with the Linux option, I use it on any computer that’ll support it along side Windows.
If your need are small and simple, keep your old PC, run Windows95 and Office 95 and you’ll be happy.
I know both are not longer supported by Microsoft, but who care? It’s for your old PC…
At least you’ll stay compatible with the rest of the world…
I’m not sure in which world Win95 is considered so compatible, but my experience with it is that it won’t run any current apps and and it can’t exchange data well with current apps. The difficulties with using something like GEOS or Linux or BeOS or whatever aren’t significantly worse than using something like Win95.
Couldn’t we just give them our crappy old slide rules & abacuses instead ?!
All of the people who are talking about xfce or Windows 95: you are missing the point. Neither of these environments will run speedily on a 386 or 486 computer. Worse yet, you wouldn’t have the RAM or hard disk space to deal with those environments if you were dealing with an old laptop.
Now I’m sure that a lot of you feel that much newer machines are fit for the dumpster. Alas, most regions don’t combine their education and sanitation departments in order to obtain those free machines.
All of the people who are talking about xfce or Windows 95: you are missing the point. Neither of these environments will run speedily on a 386 or 486 computer.
Hmmm… No they haven’t missed the point. They’re just discussing alternatives in the field of Reduced Resource Intensity Computing Environments (RRICE), a technology I invented about three minutes ago ;-). I’m not sure I would recommend Windows 95 personally, but I ran it satisfactorily on a 66 MHz 486DX2 with 16 MB RAM back in… 1995, imagine that. Of course, our expectations were different then. Even better, I ran Linux and AfterStep on a 80 MHz 486DX2 (an early AMD part) with 16 MB very nicely, thank you.
Worse yet, you wouldn’t have the RAM or hard disk space to deal with those environments if you were dealing with an old laptop.
O.K., so maybe they won’t run well on the smaller of the small, but the spectrum of old computers is not limited to old-and-slow vs. new-and-fast. We’re talking about a wide spectrum of performance from old-and-slow up to new and fast. For laughs, see The Mother of All CPU Charts at Tom’s Hardware Guide (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041220/index.html). The point is, that for a range of platforms, their exists a range of solutions, as well.
As for Xfce, it’s really good, and both it and similar lightweight window managers are not to be sneered at. These days , I’m running 64-bit Linux on an AMD64 with 1 GB RAM and KDE runs very nicely thank you, but we’ve traded a lot of machine cycles and memory for enhanced features that we don’t always use. Still, I’m not about to throw it all out in favor of the older machinery. There are some things that faster hardware is good for, but the original article and this discussion are not about those things.
I think the main issue with older machinery is maintenance and repair. The old hardware isn’t being replaced since there’s no economic advantage for manufacturers to make any of it, so the pool of spare parts shrinks while labor intensity increases as you work harder and harder to keep the old machinery going. Now this works in certain environments, such as third world countries where so many people are cash poor and their primary asset is their own labor. Necessity and need unite to help drive inventiveness with remarkable results; just consider all those old automobiles still operating daily in Cuba.
…xfce or Windows 95: you are missing the point. Neither of these environments will run speedily on a 386 or 486 computer
Either you have a short memory, or you haven’t used a 486. I had no problems running Win95 on an 486 SX2 66 (yes, SX, not DX). It had 8MB RAM and 420MB harddrive (with a separate compressed partition to press more applications into).
I had no problems with speed. Word 95 and IE3 were responsive and the only problem I had was that Office/Windows took a lot of my HD space.
Sure I’ve used a 486. I had a nice 486 DX 50. It had 16 MB RAM and a spatious 700 MB hard drive. The speed was acceptable, but by no means stellar with Windows 95. Heck, that was even true for Windows 3.1. I was quite fond of MS-DOS applications in those days because of that, only using Windows 3.1 for the software which required it. The only reason why I moved to OS/2, then Windows 95 (then back to OS/2) was because of the modem. Large downloads, well large for a 14.4 kbps modem, made multitasking more compelling than speed.
I did use Geoworks Ensemble somewhere in my Windows 3.1 phase, and seem to recall it having some compelling features though those features are certainly a moot point today. While refubishing computers for a charitable organisation a few years later, I decided to try Geoworks Ensemble on a 286 (IIRC, it would run on an XT). Windows 3.0 was a complete disgrace in comparison. I seem to recall it taking a couple of minutes to load Write, or some other absurdly simple word processor.
Ah well. I guess it’s mostly a moot point for people who would consider a 500 MHz box as garbage, though others may disagree with you. Some people take the attitude if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; and if they don’t need their computer for anything beyond writing, even an XT ain’t broke. Others simply have computers so low on their priority list that the time and money spent upgrading it isn’t compelling. In other cases, such as schools or charitable organisations, they are stuck with what they have unless they can get donations or funding. Businesses also aren’t keen about selling computers unless they can fetch a couple of hundred dollars. So Breadbox Ensemble may look appealing to cash strapped institutions who want to upgrade their office applications, and who don’t have high demands.
Would I buy it? No. I don’t have the benefit of volume discounts and the price is a tad steep. But I seem to recall them selling NewDeal for about $50 per seat a few years back, to educational institutions.
Either you have a short memory, or you haven’t used a 486. I had no problems running Win95 on an 486 SX2 66 (yes, SX, not DX). It had 8MB RAM and 420MB harddrive (with a separate compressed partition to press more applications into).
I had no problems with speed. Word 95 and IE3 were responsive and the only problem I had was that Office/Windows took a lot of my HD space.
You’re not very discrimative about calling things responsive if you think Win95 on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM is responsive.
Back in the day, I had a 286 w/1 MB running GEOS 1.2. I then got a Pentium 75 w/8 MB and Win 3.11. I set P75 up next to the 286, and was excited I could finally run Windows. That excitement lasted about 5 minutes before I realized that Windows on the Pentium was slower than GEOS on the 286.
GEOS 2.0 on the 286 was a bit slower, but was still ran faster than Win95 on the P75. I don’t remember how GEOS 2.0 on the 286 vs Win3.1 on the P75 went, but I think they were roughly equal in speed. Win95 on the P75 was just horrible to use.
For the record, I don’t consider Win95 usable without at least a 166mhz machine and 32MB of ram.
Win95 ran rather poorly in 8MB of memory. Not so great in 16MB, either. Perhaps the two of you have different standards of acceptable computing performance.
I think the article is missing the point.
There is no “low budget” and “high power” target, there are plenty machines with different specs and fields of use and what’s important is the probability you have to deal with a particular targhet.
If you are talking of old 486 and pentium with 8-32 MB of ram, quite common in middle 90s, you can still run reasonably Win95 on them and access a great software base, or run Win3.x even better and have access to a GUi and the plenty of DOS software, or run Linux or BSD with no GUI at all or the simplest GUIs and access to a lot of software too.
If you are talking of 386 and even 286 or less powerful machines wit 1-8MB of RAM, well, i think even with GEOS will figure as heawy, you should seriously consider to run plain old DOS or DosShell.
Well a 386/486 is probably a junker and not much else.I assume by “old” they mean old and not ANCIENT!
I use a laptop 166mhz with 32megs and about a 1gig hd with icewm and it is fine. Also have fluxbox on there as well as just sawfish. Miss those dells with trackballs
i disagree… a 386/486 is only old in my opinion. Ancient would be the 286/Commodore/Tandy era.
Personally I don’t see much use for these other than for show or for experimentation. But this could just be my shortsightedness.
If you want a cheap community PC, there are other alternatives, albeit a little more expensive, but more functional as well.
That WOULD be ancient!
I just meant that I see no reason to use a 386/486 when you can pick up old computers usually free from people that think they are worthless. I have been given 300mhz P2 machines and picked up a pallet of cyrix200 machines for 20 bucks…. So even I am guilty of tossing 386/486 machines because I honestly do not see the point…
So I will agree with your description of old v. ancient but I still feel that “light” linux is the best alternative for a old machine
This is a pretty good metric to use for “the lowest end hardware anyone would ever want to use” — the stuff you get handed down for free!
A couple of years ago, my main machine was a P-II 400 with 384 MB of RAM that I got for free. I ran Windows 2000 and then Suse 8.2 on, both quite comfortably. Actually I’m still using it, and it’s reasonably snappy running Gentoo and KDE 3.4.
Since then I’ve been offered more Pentium III and SPARC machines then I could possibly want. So, when there are plenty of 5-year-old PCs being dumped by companies and schools every day, why anyone would try to justify using a 15-year-old machine as anything other than a novelty or hobby machine is beyond me!
I used GeoWorks on a 386 SX back in the day, and GEOS on my C64, but damn, that was before sans TCP/IP, pre-WWW and no multitasking! Give me a break, Breadbox.
Would someone explain to me why it is ‘a good thing’ to have a Windows-like Desktop Environment? In that case, why not just use Wndows itself? I’d much rather see some OS’s trying to, err, ‘Think Differently’
Because Windows won’t run on these machines.
well, as I read, this was around before windows 95 and maybe even before 3.1. Keep in mind, this is from the late 80’s.. technically ms windows copied this.
well, as I read, this was around before windows 95 and maybe even before 3.1. Keep in mind, this is from the late 80’s.. technically ms windows copied this.
GEOS 1.0 came out a few months after Windows 3.0. So they were essentially developed at the same time.
yes… but GEOS began developing the Windows 95 look and feel before Microsoft ever thought about it. The article summary and even Breadbox doesn’t know much about the product they’ve repackaged. GEOS doesn’t mimic the Win95 look and feel, it originated it.
yes… but GEOS began developing the Windows 95 look and feel before Microsoft ever thought about it. The article summary and even Breadbox doesn’t know much about the product they’ve repackaged. GEOS doesn’t mimic the Win95 look and feel, it originated it.
Nope, sorry, the Win95 look and feel in GEOS was coded in 1997. The UI was done in roughly January – March of 97. The desktop was done at the same time, but was really just modifying the OS/2 desktop already written for GEOS as part of a project for IBM several years before.
Before that, GEOS used a Motif based UI. Motif based look and feel only – the actually implementation had nothing to do with the Unix Motif code. GEOS Motif was also *much* nicer than Unix Motif, as the widgets were rather refined and looked much nicer.
Well, if you’re referring to the Start Menu / Taskbar vs the GEOS Express Menu, then yes you are right in that regard. The Start Menu / Taskbar combo is a blatant ripoff of thte Express Menu. Take the Task Bar, move the list of running programs into a submenu of the Start Menu, and you have the GEOS Express menu. The Express Menu existed since the original release of GEOS in 1990.
Openoffice.org is slow on a 5 year old pc, i’d love to see it run on a 486.
nothing ran well on that thing!
Recently I installed Windows Millennium with OOo on a spare partition to play games. It ran very fast, and I could still download the latest security updates.
The fact that geos is programmed in assembly means it is lightning fast compared to other tools, but it will be hard to add new features and a better UI, and make it difficult to port the program to other processors.
I remember geos to be fast as well. But have you ever tried and played eg a game you played many years ago? I did and it seemed to me that my memories were not completely right. I seemed to remember the game but imagined nowadays speed and graphic. Sometimes I was badly disappointed!
So some of it might be true and I must admit I was shocked how slow win98 was!
But nevertheless I think a lot of this is just ‘good old times’-talk and if we really HAD TO use geos now we would hate it just like windows.
DOS? Single threaded? 16-bit? Fat 16? NO THANKS! I don’t care how good it is for the price. I would sooner install NetBSD or DamnSmall with Black Box at least i get a modern web browser.
DOS? Single threaded? 16-bit? Fat 16? NO THANKS! I don’t care how good it is for the price. I would sooner install NetBSD or DamnSmall with Black Box at least i get a modern web browser.
Nope, it’s not single threaded. EVERYTHING is multithreaded (it actually takes more effort to create a single threaded app in GEOS than a multithreaded one), and the multitasking is fully preemptive. It’s a hell of a lot more responsive than anything else you’ll find – even OSNews’s beloved BeOS.
GEOS uses DOS less than Win9x does.
This sort of discussion drives me up the wall. When one really looks at what they need a computer to do, rarely do they need a new computer. Hell, I doubt many posters here today ever use the 3+ gHz they have burning up at home. I am a firm believer in recylcing computers. While a 3/486 desktop can easily be replaced by a pentium class machine at the same price, the same can’t be said for laptops. Unless you hunt in the wild, eBay or horrible stores like Computer Renasannce are your options, which means $100 or more for a P166 laptop, while probally $10 for a 486/100. Sure, I could slap on Windows 95 and go, but Win95 isn’t the best option (please we all know the fustration we had). GEOS could serve as a nice way to recondition an old laptop for say gradeschoolers, to middle schoolers to have laptops (though, personally, I dont think they should have them).
If GEOS served what I needed (Word compatability, and Endnote integreation), Id probally slap that on my pentium laptop. I can certainly see it working for quite a few anyway.
The Express Menu existed since the original release of GEOS in 1990.
Don’t forget that a lot of the interface elements in PC GEOS (first released in 1990) were from the earlier versions of GEOS available for the C64, C128, and Apple ][. GEOS itself was first available in the mid ’80s.
GEOS download section – GEOS 64 and GEOS 128
http://cmdrkey.com/cbm/geos/geos1.html
mentioned on Slashdot awhile back with user comments:
“GEOS Available for Download After 18 Years”
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/13/0027205&tid=190&tid=189
Enjoy, and you can thank me by touching your monitor screen, focusing on this post, and sending me your positive mental thoughts for 666 seconds.
Windows 95 worked quite well on my 486, 20MB RAM, back in 1999. Once I tried linux and WinNT when I bought new machine, I said: “forget DOS”. IMO old machines ( < Pentium II ) are good for routers and playing with building of clusters, but not for general use today, when average user wants to play his mp3z, web browser and some instant messenger (I remember P150 choked on Win95 with WinAmp+DOS Console+IE running).
I’m surprised that Intel still keeps 8086 core in the latest Pentium processor. Screw 8086 and DOS compatibility, it’s an ancient history. If one really needs to run legacy applications, he can use an emulator: dosbox, bochs, qemu, and others.
But if you have something like Pentium II 400, 128MB RAM or similar, it’s still good piece of hardware for Win98/2000+Office 97.