Posted By
MMS
on 2024-04-11
14:22:32
 |  Re: ZOOM MEETING: Dougherty - Founder of Berkeley Softworks - GEOS for C64 - Thursday, April 18, 20
Wow, GEOS was a real technical marvel!
It could provide WYSWYG editing with GeoPublish, C64 was able to print on laser printer, not to mention the very active and smart use of 1351 mouse. It was a real breakthough for the 6502 equipped machines.
I suppose GEOS could be a REAL GOAT for the C64 if it could came out in a cartridge format, like the PrintFox cartridge, that provided the SW in ROM, and gave the C64 extra 32 KB RAM too. The GEOS Core and the main support programs could require 100KB ROM (GEOS stored the PRGs in compressed format) but more RAM could have been given too.
Imagine the C64 could start up the GEOS in SECONDS, the GeoWrite could start in seconds, and you could keep in the memory 8 full HIRES screen. and you need only 1 floppy drive, that could load the documents still faster than usual. The side effect would have been the less flexible , harder to upgrade system, but it could have been solved with a swappable (EP)ROM in the cartridge. Yeah, it could be much more expensive than the floppy version, but it could be the real 3+1 people always wanted. (in fact with 1551 the GEOS is rather fast)
It is rarely mentioned, but Berkeley softworks also developed GeoWorks Ensemble for the PC (it was a kind of DOS Shell), and it was faster and better than the Windows 3.0 of the time. More intuitive, needed less memory and way way faster. I had it on my 286 PC for a long time. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were very anxious after GEOS appeared on PC.
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