Re: The Internet that could have been...
By: Nightfox to Skylar on Fri Apr 05 2024 08:27 am

From what I heard, it sounded like GeOS performed better than Windows at the time.

It was (and still is) amazing what GEOS could do on a 1 Mhz 8-bit 6510 machine with 64KB. There were not a lot of applications available. But for WYSIWYG word processing and page layout, it was sweet.

GeoWorks performed *so* much better on a 286 than Windows 3.0 or 3.1 ever could. I had high hopes, but it never gained traction.

I often thought it was a bummer that Windows became the dominant
computer platform when there were better alternatives available.

Same here. Although I grew up using a Commodore 64 and laughing at the limitations of a "PC compatible" and the low quality of PC games available at the time. By the time I was in high school, many of my (older) geek friends had an Amiga.

Just one of many examples where the better technology fails to capture market share.

I thought OS/2 was good too..

I bought OS/2 and gave it a try around 1993. I thought it had potential but we had major driver compatility issues. By then I'd been programming for MS-DOS using Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ for a few years and much preferred staying in DOS when using a "PC".

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Re: Re: The Internet that could have been...
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Sat Apr 06 2024 10:04 am

GEOS for the 64 was the basis for QuantumLink, the predecessor to AOL.

Nope. QuantumLink was a "modified version" of PlayNet and was launched in Nov 1985. PlayNet/Q-Link was later ported and became the basis for America Online.

GEOS was developed by Berkley Softworks, no relation to PlayNet, and was released in March 1986. Some releases of GEOS did included a "bundled" copy of the Q-Link software. Although the custom Q-Link client itself was free and easily obtainable.

It was an interesting GUI at the time.

It was amazing for what it was capable of doing on a C=64.

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Re: The Internet that could have been...
By: Skylar to Nightfox on Thu Apr 11 2024 04:19 pm

It was (and still is) amazing what GEOS could do on a 1 Mhz 8-bit 6510 machine with 64KB. There were not a lot of applications available. But for WYSIWYG word processing and page layout, it was sweet.

Yeah, it was amazing what could be done with little resources. I'm also reminded of a floppy disk image that was going around in 2001 or 2002ish (from what I remember) that was a QNX Real-Time OS demo which was a bootable 1.44MB floppy disk that booted into a full GUI and included a word processor, web browser, and a couple other things. I thought it was fairly impressive.

Same here. Although I grew up using a Commodore 64 and laughing at the limitations of a "PC compatible" and the low quality of PC games available at the time. By the time I was in high school, many of my (older) geek friends had an Amiga.

I was aware of Amiga and had used them just a couple times, though by the time I got my own computer, it was an IBM compatible in 1992. Gaming was one of the things I did a lot with it, and I thought the games for it around that time were fairly decent.

I thought OS/2 was good too..

I bought OS/2 and gave it a try around 1993. I thought it had potential but we had major driver compatility issues. By then I'd been programming for MS-DOS using Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ for a few years and much preferred staying in DOS when using a "PC".

Interesting.. I thought OS/2 ran DOS applications fairly well. I've heard people say it even multi-tasked DOS applications very well. I'd often heard OS/2 described as a "better DOS than DOS" (and "better Windows than Windows").

Nightfox

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Skylar wrote to Nightfox <=-

GeoWorks performed *so* much better on a 286 than Windows 3.0 or 3.1
ever could. I had high hopes, but it never gained traction.

I had a 386sx/16 with 3 mb of RAM, and GeoWorks ran nicely. One thing
people haven't mentioned is that it had a set of nice GUI apps - the
word processor was decent, it had a little flat file DB, and a couple
of productivity apps that I used.

I often thought it was a bummer that Windows became the dominant
computer platform when there were better alternatives available.

I think the later versions came with TCP/IP access and some sort of
browser, but by then it was too late. All other OSes were run over by third-party support in Windows.

I bought OS/2 and gave it a try around 1993. I thought it had potential but we had major driver compatility issues. By then I'd been
programming for MS-DOS using Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ for a few years and much preferred staying in DOS when using a "PC".

In the corporate world, OS/2 rocked. I worked in an all-IBM shop from 1991-1993, and with OS/2 1.3 and 2.0, I could run Word and Excel, a
comm app, connect to an AS/400 over twinax, share files over a token
ring network, and all of this on a 386/25 with 8 mb of RAM.

Later, managing a Netware network, all of the apps for managing the
network were DOS console apps. You could run multiple apps without
worrying about memory - or create a custom DOS environment if you needed
it.

It wasn't until TCP/IP that OS/2 fell behind. Windows 3.11 had the apps
and built-in TCP/IP.






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