
The History of GeoWorks, Microsoft Windows’ Upstart ’90s Competitor (2016) - FollowSteph3
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-history-of-geoworks-microsoft-windows-upstart-90s-competitor
======
Lerc
I was blown away by Geoworks. Using a 25MHz 286 felt like a power machine. I
remember printing a page with a Giant lower case e on it to see if it scaled
it up to full page nicely. It printed two pages. The second just had a tiny
triangle of black on it. Looking at my document I saw the end of the e had
just clipped past the edge of the page.

At the time WYSIWYG was a bullet point promise that never delivered. Seeing it
actually happen was amazing. That it was in a product that had the feel of "Of
course it does it that way, because that's how it should be done"

I often lament that it was never an Open Source project. It got passed around
companies looking to use it in some niche or other while it slowly decayed. It
had enough enthusiasts that as an open project it would have developed.

~~~
staofbur
Acorn delivered proper WYSIWYG that actually worked on RiscOS around the same
time. Everyone else was still playing with WordPerfect. TechWriter depicted
below and impression were ridiculously powerful:

[http://www.mw-software.com/icon-
tech/Products/TechWriter/Tec...](http://www.mw-software.com/icon-
tech/Products/TechWriter/TechWriter%20pro.html)

So while your peers were just about getting a 386 with DOS/windows 3, you had
a 32-bit ARM workstation with full anti aliased font rendering and production
grade print capability.

Shame the kernel was poo and the file system so disparate to everything else
or it may have taken off.

~~~
pjmlp
Amiga users could enjoy the likes of PageStream and Papyrus Office, also about
the same time.

------
pacaro
I (briefly) had to write code to run on GeoWorks GEOS. The code was written in
a dialect of C with object oriented features that was compiled from .goc and
.goh files to .c files in a manner similar to cfront. It was not a pleasant
experience.

Edit: This was in 1997. We were writing a web browser for the Brother Geobook
which was a device with late 90s PDA capabilities in the form factor of a late
90s laptop. I don't think that it was a particularly successful product.

~~~
billpg
In Cambridge, later moving to Bury StEdmunds?

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, I thought you were someone I
briefly used to work with. Sorry.)

~~~
pacaro
I joined STNC in October 97, so moved in the opposite direction, starting in
Bury St Edmunds and moving to Cambridge after the acquisition!

~~~
billpg
Ah, you would have joined shortly after I left, so you may have been my
replacement. Did they give you the email sending/receiving components too?

~~~
pacaro
Fortunately not, I mostly finished the colour port. And then Brother cancelled
the contract (or at least didn't choose us for the colour device).

I still see Ran from time to time (we're both at Amazon)

------
alexhutcheson
Steve Yegge had an interesting take on what it was like to work at GeoWorks:

> OK: I went to the University of Washington and [then] I got hired by this
> company called Geoworks, doing assembly-language programming, and I did it
> for five years. To us, the Geoworkers, we wrote a whole operating system,
> the libraries, drivers, apps, you know: a desktop operating system in
> assembly. 8086 assembly! It wasn't even good assembly! We had four
> registers! [Plus the] si [register] if you counted, you know, if you counted
> 386, right? It was horrible.

> I mean, actually we kind of liked it. It was Object-Oriented Assembly. It's
> amazing what you can talk yourself into liking, which is the real irony of
> all this. And to us, C++ was the ultimate in Roman decadence. I mean, it was
> equivalent to going and vomiting so you could eat more. They had IF! We had
> jump CX zero! Right? They had "Objects". Well we did too, but I mean they
> had syntax for it, right? I mean it was all just such weeniness. And we knew
> that we could outperform any compiler out there because at the time, we
> could!

> So what happened? Well, they went bankrupt. Why? Now I'm probably
> disagreeing – I know for a fact that I'm disagreeing with every Geoworker
> out there. I'm the only one that holds this belief. But it's because we
> wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good
> tools, world class tools: trust me, you need 'em. But at some point, man...

> The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to
> make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you
> know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around,
> going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's
> going off this way, right?

> This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language
> system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform
> for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going
> in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is
> just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out
> that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed
> the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called
> multiple times.

> Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-
st...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-
back.html)

~~~
taeric
I was all ready to complain about this quote. Specifically, it seems somewhat
silly. MS didn't win by having a better operating system. They "won" by having
products people were buying. A revenue stream is a valuable thing.

That said, I encourage everyone to fully read the section that is pulled from.
The whole article, actually. Very nice talk and I think it contains some very
insightful points. In particular, the idea to keep the system small and the
rest will fall out of that.

------
mnm1
I loved Geoworks. It did things on my 386 that Windows 3.1 had no hope of
doing ever (like loading and working). Also, the banner program wasn't just
useful with dot-matrix printers. I had an inkjet and remember many birthdays
printing out banners for my family (we used Scotch tape to put them together).
Good times.

~~~
krallja
Why didn't people load continuous feed paper into inkjets? It seems like it
would have worked. I never tried it either.

~~~
tinus_hn
Inkjets printed pages have to dry or the ink will smudge, so printers (at
least those of that era) have a mechanism that holds the page for a few
seconds before dropping it on the stack of completed pages.

~~~
krallja
Seems like having the banner pour over the edge of a table would give it
enough time to dry, too.

~~~
tinus_hn
There's a million ways you could make it work but the default way will lead to
a big mess so the printers don't allow you to use continuous paper feed. It's
kind of a niche feature anyway.

------
hoodoof
Back in those days, Windows had an absolute lock on the industry for several
reasons:

1: it was the incumbent

2: there were no hardware drivers for any other operating system

3: there was software for Microsoft operating systems, and no useful software
for any other OS

4: Microsoft has legal contracts with the hardware manufacturers which
required that a icense fee be paid regardless of whether or not Windows
shipped with each machine.

5: probably more reasons

As an outcome of the above it turned out to be impossible for any other OS to
get a foothold on the PC. It's hgard for people to understand now, but there
was still an opening for some other OS to get a foothold.

In the end, another OS turned up and started making major headway on the PC.
It succeeded against Windows in the way that such battles tend to be played
out - by playing to a different set of rules. That OS of course was Linux and
its rules were to be free, to have a collaborative development model, to be
server focused, and to have the fortunate timing of being at the start of the
era of connected computing. I remember being startled that I could get a free
operating system by buying an issue of a computer magazine at the newsagent
with a CDROM on the front containing Linux.

Eventually the seemingly impossible happened and an OS came along that beat
Microsoft on the desktop, or at least competed effectively with Microsoft
Windows - and that of course was OSX. And OSX against succeeded by playing to
its own rules. No need for hardware drivers for every device under the sun
because they it only ran on Apple hardware. It had applications from the
Macintosh user base (and Microsoft), and turned out to be a really nicely
integrated and functional OS (IMO).

Its a pity GEOS didn't make headway, at the time I really wanted SOMETHING,
ANYTHING to give Microsoft effective competition because it looked back then
like it was going to be 1,000 years of Microsoft in first place with no
second, third or fourth place runners up.

BeOS also gets points for having a try at competing with Microsoft.

~~~
dfox
Back in those days, mostly nobody cared about driver support. In Windows 3.1,
there were three classes of things that you could even install driver for:
graphics cards (if you wanted more than 640x480, which most people didn't care
about), printers (windows had ~70 different drivers, on the other hand most
printers were compatible with some defacto standard) and other devices which
effectively were sound cards.

Both windows and geos mostly relied on DOS and BIOS for things like filesystem
and block device access, so for scsi disks, zip drives and similar you either
needed DOS driver or just correct BIOS ROM module on the card.

This only changed with Windows 95, which still could use DOS drivers, but
reliability and performance suffered in that case. Native 32bit windows
drivers were built on top of Plug and Play model, which has the unfortunate
feature that given device is either recognized by windows automatically or
needs specific driver for that specific device (surprising amount of these
"drivers" are plain text files that just map the device id onto some standard
windows driver).

~~~
oblio
While I agree with you, saying that nobody cared for driver support because it
was provided by DOS leaves out some people: other OS vendors :)

Microsoft sidestepped the issue at first by building Windows on top of DOS but
even they had to tackle it head on for Windows 95, as you say. Everyone else,
though, was basically doomed to be locked out of the market because of this
issue.

~~~
pjc50
I'm still struggling to think of what drivers would actually count here,
depending on what time period we're talking about. Early 80s? Late 80s
(Win3)?. INT 21h file services?

It was the era when DOS games didn't use "video drivers", they all wrote
directly to the VGA registers. Similarly for sound cards: you could buy a
Soundblaster or (if you were rich enough) a Gravis Ultrasound, and other
manufacturers cloned the hardware API directly. Games later tended to come
with "DOS4GW", which was effectively a 32-bit operating system that could load
from and return to DOS.

------
svachalek
GeoWorks was pretty cool on the 386 but GEOS on the Commodore 64 was just
unreal -- it was slow and required some tedious disk swapping but even the
idea of selectable, proportional fonts at different font sizes among its many
other features was amazing on a 1MHz CPU, 64k RAM system.

~~~
eru
I also had GEOS on a C64, but I remember it being a cartridge---so no disk
swapping required.

I picked mine up at a garage sale, too.

As an aside: I just learned/remembered that the original Nintendo Game Boy ran
at roughly four times the CPU frequency of the C64.

~~~
paler
The Game Boy has a Z80-like processor, though. Generally, Z80 instructions
take more clock cycles to execute than 6502 instructions, so the clock speeds
are not directly comparable.

~~~
eru
Yes. The C64 also had more RAM.

------
compsciphd
I remember running geoworks on an 8086 with 1MB of ram. ran reasonably well
and came with the proto AOL (for some reason I thought it came with a Quantum
Link client that looked like an AOL client, but according to wikipedia Quantum
Link was already renamed to AOL at this time).

It was a pretty amazing piece of code that made that 8086 very usable for a
few more years.

~~~
emeraldd
Out of curiosity, what kind of a machine was that? I didn't think you could
get that much ram in an 8086 ...

~~~
compsciphd
It was a panasonic of some sort. Don't remember the details that clearly.
Remember the turbo button, and I remember being upset that Wolfenstein 3D
required a 286 and wouldn't run on it. I'm also positive it came with more
than 640k of ram, as would go through the tricks to load things in the upper
portion to have more "normal" ram for games and the like.

~~~
robin_reala
I’m surprised that it came with a turbo button; those were a hack to downclock
the bus to a lower speed to get old software that had assumed a specific clock
speed to work correctly. Would be unusual on an 8086.

~~~
ido
lots of 8088/8086 "turbo xt"s had their CPU run at 8-10mhz vs 4.77mhz for the
original IBM PC & XT.

~~~
twoodfin
Yup, I had an 8Mhz Hyundai XT clone with the same "feature".

------
code_duck
I used GEOS often on my C64 as a child. It was my first experience with a
graphical desktop interface and seamlessly segued into the Amiga, for me.

I recall the paint program, with its textured fills, and all the simple bitmap
tools everyone is familiar with today in MS Paint. The word processing app,
really more like desktop publishing. The general file management and window
system...

It seems all rather forward thinking for 1986. It seems like the concepts for
most of our software tends to be around for long before we have the technology
to do it properly. All the pre-internet machines I had later just did what my
Commodore 64 and GEOS did, but faster and with more colors.

------
rajatrocks
When I was an undergrad in the CS dept at U.C. Berkeley (88-92), Geoworks is
where >everyone< wanted to work.

------
davidgerard
I used GeoWorks for serious work in 1994, because the place I was working was
too stingy to spring for a Windows 3.1 licence. Fabulously easy to use, and
crashed at the drop of a hat losing all unsaved work ... frickin' Win3.1
_WordPad_ would have been superior, certainly in stability at least ...

~~~
Rondom
In Win 3.1 it was still called Write. If I am not mistaken mswrite.exe will
launch WordPad to this date (and pbrush.exe MS Paint)

~~~
davidgerard
That's the one!

------
0x445442
By the early 90s pc clones were much cheaper than $2K and I'd reckon OS/2 was
a much bigger competitor to Windows than GEOS.

~~~
ams6110
On the other hand, in the same era (~1993) you could have had what was
effectively Mac OS X (NEXTSTEP) which ran on x86 clones at that time (though
with a fairly narrow set of supported hardware). Absolutely blew away anything
offered by Microsoft, Apple, or IBM at that time.

~~~
rrdharan
You could also have had an Amiga which AIUI blew away NeXTSTEP as far as
price/performance?

Not really speaking from a position of expertise on the matter, since I've
only ever _seen_ (and never used) a Video Toaster and the only NeXT machine
I've ever used is the one in the computer museum in Google's NYC office.

~~~
ido
amiga was no longer particularly cutting edge by the time VGA and 386s became
common in the 90s, its advantage was astonishing mostly during the 80s and
very early 90s (8088-286 era).

------
TazeTSchnitzel
> That computer wasn’t super-fast—what, with its 40-megabyte hard drive and
> one megabyte of RAM—and, as a result, it really benefited from the
> lightweight, object-oriented approach of GeoWorks.

…am I the only one that made a double-take at this? I don't associate OOP with
being lightweight. It's either oxymoronic or irrelevant.

~~~
wvenable
Much of the OS was written in an object-oriented assembly language!

This is also what doomed GeoWorks; much of OS was written so low-level is was
impossible to port PC/GEOS from 8086 to newer processors.

------
rrdharan
I remember reading about (or at least seeing cool looking ads) for GeoWorks,
DESQview (and DESQview/X!), and GEM in magazines like Byte in the early 90s. I
was always sad that I never got to try out any of them on my machine.

~~~
compsciphd
I used them all. They all lost to windows because of "Developers Developers
Developers". i.e. no one really wrote apps for them (besides AOL for
Geoworks).

Desqview was neat it allowed you to multitask dos apps, but dos 5 basically
included same functionality in a more restricted forms (basically how MSFT did
to all of Quarterdeck's stuff). Desqview/X was nice if you were in an unix
environment, but vast majority of users were not. GEM was along the same lines
as geoworks, but recall it being less usefull.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I seem to remember the main reason people ran GEM was because it was bundled
with Ventura DTP software.

------
fred_is_fred
I loved GEOS too, used it on my C64. It was probably black magic that they got
it to run so well on there.

------
moonbug22
Used to swear by my HP OmniGo 100.

~~~
jaclaz
As a side note the New Deal Office:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/nd32.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/nd32.html)

and the Breadbox Ensemble which was built from the ashes of GeoWorks:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html)

were not at all bad, and for low powered older machines were actually a
godsend.

