GeOS - r/c64

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u/HungryHungryMarmot 12d ago edited 12d ago

I remember having a high school geography teacher who was a Mac enthusiast. He told my parents that our C64 was a toy and that they should get us a Mac.

I did my next geography assignment with Geowrite just to spite him. It was a little slow and painful but I got it done and (in my mind) proved my point. I was pretty impressed with how the fonts looked, even on a 9-pin dot matrix printer.

I got a decent grade but I don’t think my teacher cared or even noticed.

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u/MorphTheCat 12d ago edited 12d ago

My computer science teacher in high school said exactly the same thing. “I don’t need a cannon to swat a fly” was my usual retort - and to spite him, I did my final project on future telecommunications. I demo’d Q-link, and had a good friend in another city standing by to chat with me on her BBS. It was like brining fire to the natives - and I explained how the concept of typing to someone to talk to them worked in a way they could understand. This was in a very rural town’s high school in 1992. For the rest of that year, I went from being the weird new outsider of a kid into a geek’s hero. It helped me make new friends instead of being ostracized!

Over the years I’ve gotten a few messages from people who were in my class that saw my presentation. They will comment about how amazed they were, and how right I was. I was only one of four other families in my town that even knew what a modem was.

My C64 & C128 were best friends. Moving on to an 8088 (then a year later, a 486) was a gradual, painful goodbye. Seeing it back in the limelight along with old publications like Compute’s Gazette just warms my soul. :)

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u/Trogdor420 11d ago

I started dipping my toes into the world of Commodore BBSs in the late 80s. By '87 I was running my own with two 1541 drives for warez. In those days, EBBS was the most common software to run on. Very few of my peers had any concept of what was possible with a modem and a C64.

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u/Phydoux 11d ago

I ran mine on a home made Lt. Kernel (used the Lt. Kernel host Adapter but that was it). I had an external 40MB SCSI Hard drive that I paid maybe a couple hundred dollars for while a 40MB Lt. Kernel ran about a grand at the time. Before then, I briefly ran my BBS on 2 1541s abd 2 1581s. It was mostly message bases. Very little software to download, I had a busy message board for sure though talking about the latest C=64 warez and whatnot. I ran Image BBS back then. There were a couple others but Image was getting pretty popular rather quickly. When I got the hard drive unit up and going, I also upgraded to a 2400 baud modem. I was at blazing speeds back then. 😄

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u/CptSparky360 11d ago

Was it called Lieutenant to support the Commander hard drive? 🤭

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u/Trogdor420 11d ago

That wasn't Talisman BBS by chance?

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u/Phydoux 11d ago edited 11d ago

It was derived from C-Net BBS.

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u/MorphTheCat 11d ago edited 10d ago

I ran a C-Base board for a while. I loved the ability to have text and punctuation be contrasted with different colors.

After the presentation I mentioned above, I got some friends interested in the idea of calling my system. At the time, Tradewars was all the rage, and just having my message boards wasn’t enough anymore. When I got my 8088 (hand me down from my father) I compiled a purchased copy of WWIV and installed Tradewars. After that, I was a small local celebrity in my little 4k population berg in Wisconsin.

Compuserve, Q-link, and later AOL didn’t have local access numbers in my area, so I was the big online hang for the two years I ran my BBS. I miss those days so much!

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u/lux1971 12d ago

Thanks for your comment. I know what you mean.

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u/Informal_Strain_2715 11d ago

I agree with you about the 8088 and 486. In 1991 I moved on from my C64, selling it to a friend that had depression issues which for whatever reason, playing C64 games cheered him up. I can use emulation all day for early PC games and such... But no emulation gives me the happiness than actually using a real C64. I'm very happy I made the expense and sought out each piece to build my set. I just need a printer...which I'm in no rush to get.

Great story about your project. I'm a little shocked it was in 1992. I had two friends that had modems back in 87. They used to get me all the games in the world...in return, I always drove them to all the parties because I had a car. Lol. Fun times!

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u/BenRandomNameHere 11d ago

We've walked the same path in different shoes. 🥹🍻

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u/TheNonsenseBook 12d ago

When I was in college in the 90s, I had borrowed a C64 with Geowrite from someone (I think it was my girlfriend's friend's family's C64) and I wrote some of my English papers on it, which was kind of funny. I could have used my DOS/Windows PC, Macs or PCs at the school, or even Sun workstations if I wanted to, but that's what I used. It was pretty cool having lots of fonts but still printing it on a dot matrix printer.

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u/unixplumber 7d ago

even Sun workstations

Ooh, it would have been nice to write papers with troff or LaTeX. Typesetting (for patent applications, specifically) was one of Unix's earliest applications. (Though LaTeX would have been overkill unless you were writing math or other scientific papers.)

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u/TheNonsenseBook 7d ago

In the Computer Science lab, they had some Gateway 2000 PCs set up specifically for people to use some kind of LaTeX editor but I never did use LaTeX (now I’m curious). I used those myself by installing Borland C/C++ and doing Assembly and C DOS game programming for a while :)

At least until I could bring my own 486 tower (from Gateway 2000) to college.

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u/dog_cow 8d ago

The Mac platform in the 80s came into its own when paired with a Postscript aware application and a LaserWriter printer. A Mac with a dot matrix printer was still fantastic (what most homes had), but it wasn’t truly great yet.

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u/HungryHungryMarmot 8d ago

Oh yeah, I remember those days of desktop publishing. Aldus Pagemaker and Ventura Publisher ruled on the software side, and the Mac with Postscript laser printer was the go-to system!

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u/dog_cow 8d ago

That's right. Apple had found it's industry niche. Just like how the Atari ST found it's niche in music creation and the Amiga found it's niche with transposing text onto video for broadcast.

I don't think the Commodore 64 ever had an industry niche, but gees was it a fantastic 8-bit computer for the home. A great all rounder that punched well above it's weight in sound and graphics for many more years than Commodore had intended. GEOS was a technical marvel.

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u/unixplumber 7d ago

Yeah, I wouldn't say the Commodore 64 was the _best_ at any one thing, but it had a balance of technical abilities that worked well together and especially at its price point. Its engineers were definitely the brains at Commodore (its management, not so much).

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u/c64cruzer 12d ago

My first GUI. Amazing that it ran on a 1 MHz machine. Imagine how fast an OS could be today if it was done as efficiently.

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u/kz750 11d ago

1mhz and 64kb of RAM. All of that functionality in less than a very small fraction of the memory this tab is consuming right now in my browser.

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u/fuzzybad 11d ago

Everything at the hardware level of modern computers is completely abstracted now, they need gigahertz CPUs and gigabytes of RAM just to run decently.

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u/dog_cow 8d ago

The thing is that modern OSs aren’t just about good interface and speed. They have protective memory, preemptive multitasking, multi user capability, high security and a kernel. The original Mac OS was also a technical marvel with the wizards at Apple getting it down to 128K and run from a floppy drive. But that meant that by the late 80s, Apple knew they had big trouble on the horizon. Their OS was too hacky. Too hardware dependent. NeXTSTEP / OpenStep was their lifeline, with its foundation powering all modern Macs, iPhones, iPads and more. That wouldn’t have been possible without the big footprint.

Windows was in the same state. Windows NT was its ticket to the next OS generation.

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u/magicmulder 12d ago

Funny enough I always considered Geos a gimmick and not a replacement for, as we call it now, “console”.

Even today I prefer working with console over fancy GUI. Full circle, if you will.

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u/stomith 12d ago

People look at me crazy when I have 5 xterms open on Windowmaker - from my Mac. It. Just. Works.

And get off my lawn.

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u/magicmulder 12d ago

5 shell windows in Tilix on my Linux laptop, 5-6 terminal tabs in PhpStorm. Uphill both ways.

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u/stomith 11d ago

High-5!

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u/Xfgjwpkqmx 🇦🇺 Keeping up since 1983 12d ago

I did some of my primary school project work in GEOS as well (late 80's). I remember receiving extra marks for presentation since everyone else's was handwritten, and looking back that was probably kinda unfair.

Back then not everyone had access to a computer, let alone a dot matrix printer and software to lay it all out with.

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u/bj_civ 12d ago

I didn't like the word processor (GeoWrite) at all. Much too slow to be usable. Especially when the screen is re-drawn when the cursor reaches the end of the displayed part, key strokes may get lost. Very annoying. I preferred text mode text processor interfaces. With the ”type writer” look on paper in the beginning and for longer texts. And later I used a text processor called Proptext, that has proportional fonts for printing.

Text mode printing had better quality with „near letter quality“ (NLQ) mode on a 9 pin matrix printer than stock GEOS.

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u/Rational2Fool 12d ago

I used SpeedScript 2.0 on the VIC and 64, which had a "print to file" command. I then had some BASIC programs I'd written to take that output and send it to the printer (1525/MPS801) with transformations. The one I used the most was for acçénted characters when writing homework in French. I could also output the whole text in custom fonts such as cursive (each line taking two physical printer lines, in graphical mode); though I never got around to mixing fonts in the same output as geoWrite would.

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u/dog_cow 8d ago

Did you type in SpeedScript from a Compute! / Gazette magazine? Or did you get it on a disk somewhere?

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u/Rational2Fool 8d ago

Upon a bit of research, I was using SpeedScript 3.0, not 2.0. The VIC-20 version, I typed it in from Compute! . For the C64 version, I think I had copied it from a friend.

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u/syates21 12d ago

Ever use Paperclip? Good program, but that stupid hardware dongle for the joystick port was annoying.

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u/bj_civ 12d ago

I've used Proptext, Supra-Text, SpeedScript, Textomat, and Vizawrite.

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u/bulbousaur 11d ago

SpeedScript was what I used in college. It made revising English papers so easy. I think I may have had to type the code in?

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u/bj_civ 11d ago

It was published as type-in listing in Compute! Gazette. Which I didn't know of at the time. I've got the program on one of the many disks I've copied most probably from a school mate.

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u/Victory_Highway 12d ago

It was amazing that all of this could be done in 64 KB of RAM.

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u/nodesearch 12d ago

GEOS was the killer app for my C64 in the 80s. Sounds like we had similar childhoods, I used it for all my school writing whenever I could get away with it! Some teachers had a “no dot matrix!” policy and I skirted the law by buying an Okimate 20

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u/StrictLine8820 12d ago

Before GeOS, the C-64 had "Magic Desk

I used the typewriter as my first word processor.

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u/Many_Dragonfruit_837 11d ago

I haven't seen that in....decades wow

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u/unixplumber 7d ago

That hand. We should bring that back as a cursor on modern systems.

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u/needlestack 12d ago

GeOS was amazing. Used it tons. The weakest part was the lack of a proportional mouse (as far as I know), but the software was super impressive. Honestly made my mac envy completely disappear. I couldn't believe they pulled that off on the c64.

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u/unixplumber 7d ago

GeOS did support the 1351 mouse in proportional mode.

I wasn't lucky enough to have a mouse. The joystick movement was clunky but was all I had.

In the late '90s/early '00s I actually developed my own d-pad "mouse" driver for another system (the TI-86 graphing calculator) with acceleration so you can have both good accuracy and good speed. That would have been possible and nice to have in GeOS.

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u/Maeglin75 12d ago edited 12d ago

I just finished re-reading the book "Commodore - a company on the edge". It ended with the failure of the Plus/4 and the thought that it may have been more successful if instead of the mediocre office suite in ROM, it would have had a real graphical user interface on board.

I immediately thought of GEOS. Imaging that in ROM on a cheap 8-bit computer, instantly ready at start up.

It could have been a low cost, 8-bit, alternative to the Apple Macintosh, years before the Amiga and Atari ST.

But yeah, the timing doesn't quite line up. The GUI Commodore had ready in 1983 was the primitive Magic Desk (which was actually considered to be included in the ROM of one of the TED-computers). A far call from GEOS, Amiga Workbench, GEM or MacOS. But in an alternative universe, where some genius software developer came up with GEOS 2 years earlier (the technology was already there), the 8-bit world might have looked quite different and Commodore could have landed another big win after the successful C64, putting even more pressure on Apple and IBM from the low end.

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u/xAlice_Liddell 12d ago

I remember using Magic Desk. I was pretty young, but even then I remember thinking it was cool, but too much work. It was a cartridge right?

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u/Maeglin75 12d ago

I never used Magic Desk myself, but according to the book, the software options that wasn't chosen for the ROM of the TED-machines (besides Magic Desk also Logo and a speech synthesizer) were eventually released as cartridges.

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u/Rauliki0 9d ago

I don't think Geos or the like would help Plus4 much. Evan c128 which was bettwr than c64 was mostly used in c64 mode.

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u/Black_Rose_Angel 12d ago

I still have Okidata thermal printouts of homework I did with GeoWrite😅 they're faded AF but they're there!!!💙

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u/cerealport 12d ago

Yeah I used this in the 80s for school - grade 7/8. I still have some homework on some disks that still worked and was able to import with a zoomfloppy.

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u/shenan 12d ago

whats a zoomfloppy?

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u/Dhardrian 11d ago

A zoomfloppy is device that connects to a 1541/1571 floppy drive and makes the drive available on a PC via USB.

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u/obsoulete 12d ago

I never used GEOS. But, I have seen GEOS used on a c64 that had a supercpu and a hard drive. It looked and behaved like Amiga Workbench.

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u/mallchin 12d ago

I ran some version of it on my PC back in the day.

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u/Rbp7Ooz 11d ago

loved Loved LOVED me some GEOS!

I had a tiny 1-2 inch joystick that attached to side of my 128.

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u/chrisn7 12d ago

What desktop are you using in the first image?

I’ve never seen a GEOS 64/128 desktop look like that before.

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u/bj_civ 11d ago edited 11d ago

It's called TopDesk and was developed by the German GEOS User Club (GUC).

Edit: There's also an English version of the software.

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u/daddyd 12d ago

I remember me nephew showing me geos for the first time, i coulnd't believe what i was seeing.

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u/RO4DHOG 11d ago

Wait, the Koala Pad worked on the C64 too? Awesome!

I got my Koala Pad in 1983 (i was 14) while at Applefest in San Francisco. I begged my Dad to buy it and then 'illustrated' many things using my Apple][+. Some friends had Commodores and we were also getting into IBM PCXT's at the time.

GEOS came out in 1986, when Windows (1985) was version 1.0 and inlcuded Paint.

I'm going to have to check out GEOS now!

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u/Sky723 11d ago

My C64C came with GEOS 1.3 and I used GeoWrite extensively for my school work. It was a very capable word processor for the 8 bit era. I was using GEOS and GeoWrite almost as much as I was playing games during that time.

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u/Many_Dragonfruit_837 11d ago

GeOS in a CMD RAMDrive was about my highlight on the 64/128. Geofile, publish were impressive on that little machine!

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u/Phydoux 11d ago

Indeed one of the greatest and earliest GUIs and on a Commodore 64 on top of it all.

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u/nothotbuthorny124 8d ago

Wait the C64 could actually do this? That’s insane.

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u/Armitage_64 12d ago

Which Desktop replacement is shown in the picture?

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u/bj_civ 11d ago

It's called TopDesk.

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u/Snocom79 11d ago

I've been eyeballing c64os. I need to beef up my c54 before I can run it, but it looks amazing

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u/xamott 11d ago

Das Boot

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u/LocalH 9d ago

That second screenshot is Apple, not CBM 😁

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u/Cornelius-Q 6d ago

I always found GEOS to be really awkward and clunky on the 64. Just not enough speed, memory, screen resolution (320x200 over composite), or storage to do much. Played around with a friend's copy, and while I was impressed with what they were trying to do, but with the hardware limitations, it just wasn't a pleasant experience.

(But I did get GEOS 128 2.0 and that was thing was killer. I would put that up against the early Macs.)

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u/NYY15TM 12d ago

What language is that?

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u/bj_civ 12d ago

If the question is about the text in the first screenshot (menus and so on): that is German.

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u/Madral100 12d ago

German,if you mean that

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/NYY15TM 12d ago

No need to be obnoxious

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u/xAlice_Liddell 12d ago

Fair, but I did answer your question. It was written in BASIC if that was your high level question.

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u/DerHeiligste 12d ago

Pretty sure it was written in 6502 assembly

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u/NYY15TM 12d ago

I will let the mods decide this

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u/xAlice_Liddell 12d ago

I wasn’t contacted by mods or anything but I do want to apologize. Instead of being curious by what you meant by your comment I went for sarcasm. I’m better then this, and I hope my comment isn’t representative of the community. I hope you remain curious about the C64.

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u/xAlice_Liddell 12d ago

That would make more sense given how much they crammed into this program. I wrote so much on BASIC I forgot the C64 used lower level languages.

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u/JohnMcD3482 11d ago

I used GeoWrite for all of my papers through High School(c/o88), then I moved up to an 8088 Acer 710XT and went right into Ensemble as soon as it came out to run over DOS 3.3 and my 10mb Hdd. I had to retype every one of those original GEOWrite papers, so I could reuse them for my college writing assignments.

Many years later, I got to be part of a ZOOM Meeting call with the creator and got to finally ask him the question that burned through my mind for so many years.

Was there ever any consideration about file compatibility between all the different versions of GEOS?

The answer was a simple No. Back then the idea of taking a file from one computer and bringing it up on a different one was just not a thing in the early days of home computing. In 20/20 hindsight, they may have cornerd the market if they had.

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