A History of GeoWorks and the Inclusion of a Brother GeoBook in Today’s #VintageComputing of the Internet

Cameron Kaiser on the Old Vintage Computing Research blog gives a very detailed account of the GEOS operating system, the PC/GeoWorks Ensemble, and a line of laptops made by Brother (of typewriter fame) that run Ensemble.

Incredibly, the first commercial release in October 1990 of what was called GeoWorks Ensemble achieved almost all of its goals, running on XT-class systems with only 512K of RAM, CGA and MS-DOS 2.0. Recognizing the importance of the new operating system to the company, Berkeley Softworks also rebranded itself as GeoWorks with the release. In addition to serving as a graphical shell for DOS, which GeoWorks ran on, the adjustable user levels featured a simplified or full user interface, depending on beginners and advanced users. It included a word processor, file manager, paint program, and telecommunication modules, all written in assembly language, C with non-standard object extensions, and an interpreted language called IZL…

…Ensemble lives on and today is free and open source. NewDeal Office went through several revisions, including two major version upgrades (to PC/GEOS 4.0) and support for the 486-based set-top box MyTurn GlobalPC, until the company went out of business in 2000 and GeoWorks took over resumed the licence. Breadbox Computer Company acquired the rights in 2003 as part of the dissolution and continued modest development of GeoWorks. A long-gestating project to bring GEOS to Android devices came to a sudden halt when company founder Frank Fischer died suddenly of a heart attack and the company went out of business. Luckily, former Breadbox employee Falk Rehwagen negotiated with his family to bring GEOS to a freely available modern platform buildable with Watcom and with a full SDK, and this is the package you can download today that still works great in DOSBox .

Read more in the post here.

Adafruit publishes a wide variety of written and video content, including interviews and reports on the producer market and the world of technology at large. Our standards page is intended as a guide to the best practices used by Adafruit, as well as an overview of the ethical standards to which Adafruit aspires. While Adafruit is not an independent journalism institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Adafruit is on Mastodon, participate! www.adafruit.com/mastodon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lGRgO40Uhm

Stop Breadboarding and Soldering – Start Making Now! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clips, and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in minutes with drag-and-drop programming site MakeCode, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class at code.org, join CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the new and improved Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, infrared reception and transmission, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator pads and many sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole world of electronics and coding is waiting for you and fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:00pm ET! To join, go to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.

Join us every Wednesday night at 8:00 PM ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 36,000 creators on Adafruit Discord channels and become part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org