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PC/Geos, Geoworks etc.

Just been wasting time doing some background PC/Geos research and found this amusing:geoworks button.jpg
Anyone still got one of these buttons?

This Office suite comparison made me chuckle as well:
win-ndo.jpg
 
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T reaches into shirt pocket and trumps all with an OmniGo 100 Palmtop from HP, GeOS in ROM! (Touch screen 2KEWL!) Anyone care to raise me a Tandy Zoomer?

--T
 
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So... what's a better option for me? I'm looking into getting a used computer so I can install a 5.25 floppy disk drive plus an internal zip drive. I was wondering what route should I take?

A 486? A Pentium 3 or P4? I'm kinda low on cash so I was looking to spend only about $100 on the older machine and possibly putting GEOS Ensemble on it. My idea is to sell this kinda setup to people I know who'd like to use a PC but are low on funds.
 
facattack said:
So... what's a better option for me? I'm looking into getting a used computer so I can install a 5.25 floppy disk drive plus an internal zip drive. I was wondering what route should I take?

A 486? A Pentium 3 or P4? I'm kinda low on cash so I was looking to spend only about $100 on the older machine and possibly putting GEOS Ensemble on it. My idea is to sell this kinda setup to people I know who'd like to use a PC but are low on funds.
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Well, I would avoid the Pentium 4; the power consumption would consume much of the savings. Look at the bottom rung Core2s off-lease systems which I have seen at about $115 now. Better system for most uses with much lower power consumption.
 
Most likely nothing ;). As mentioned in the other thread you are probably better off going the Linux route. No per seat licensing to consider.
 
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I just got a Brother GeoBook from eBay. Unfortunately mine is the NB-60 model with the ghosty, low-contrast monochrome passive-matrix LCD, instead of the NB-80c with the color LCD (although that likely was passive matrix as well). The really interesting thing is that although it starts up in GEOS 3.0 with Brother's own application suite ("BrotherWorks 98"), in the File Manager you can access a DOS prompt by clicking on COMMAND.COM on the F: drive.

nb80c.jpg


It turns out that the GeoBook runs on an AMD Elan x86 processor, with Datalight ROM-DOS 6.22 and the GEOS system software on a ROM drive, and an AMD flash memory drive for user data storage. It also has one PCMCIA Type II card slot, although the documentation and software make no mention of it. So despite being sold as a "closed" system, you can run MS-DOS software on it, and install your own GEOS applications on the flash drive.

Here was Datalight's press release in 1997 about the GeoBook, giving some of its technical details:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1997_Sept_23/ai_19777347/
 
The major disappointment with the GeoBook's implementation of GEOS is that it does not multitask, or even task switch, at all. Even the desk accessories such as the Calculator and Preferences open full-screen. This makes a machine that was already obsolete at the time of its introduction (1997) feel even more outdated.
 
So far most of the PC DOS 2000 programs and utilities I've tried work fine on the GeoBook, as well as the Windows 98/MS-DOS 7.1 versions of EDIT and ScanDisk. MSD gets to the system information screen but then locks up.

One annoying thing is that the blinking cursor is not visible until you type MODE BW80 (or CO80). Also, the "Menu" key on the keyboard is actually the "Alt" key.

Third-party utilities are hit or miss; some work fine, while others lock up or behave erratically. I did at least get far enough to learn that the GeoBook's AMD processor is the equivalent of a 386SX-33, and it has 4 megs of RAM -- enough to run Windows 3.1, if you could somehow disable the ROM drive and boot it from a PCMCIA flash drive. The display is Chips & Tech 512K Super VGA with VESA 1.2, with support for 800x600 in 256 colors and 1024x768 in 16 colors, although the GeoBook's LCD only supports 640x480. The system BIOS is Phoenix, which makes me wonder if there is some way to hack into the CMOS Setup while the GeoBook splash screen is being displayed after you turn it on.

Ctrl-Alt-Del (or Ctrl-"Menu"-Del) does not work to perform a warm boot; at least not while GEOS is resident in memory. The only way to restart the GeoBook is to flip the power switch off and then back on.
 
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Just thought I'd pass on that Frank, the owner of Bread Box Ensemble, has died and his web content has been deleted. Winworld has the lite version. Version BBE 4.1.2 is on there as well, but needs to update the serial no. to one that works. Geoworks is also available on Trixters ftp server ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/Software/GEOS/ www.geos-infobase.de has some software for the Geos platform.

Toastytech is worth a visit http://toastytech.com/guis/indexgeos.html

You can mix and match Geoworks 2.x apps with New Deal Office 3.1 as a member of the IRC #vc channel on irc.slashnet.org found out. He's using it on his IBM PS/2 model 25 AIO system.

So if you do have an older machine lying idle do give it a shot. Even if its just to play with something a bit different. Who knows you might be impressed enough to leave it on that system. It only needs 530k of conventional memory to run.
 

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Just to update the above post, as it was me on the IRC channel "Brandon|i7" at the time..

In order to get Geoworks 2.0 apps to work I simply merged the contents of the GEOS20 folder into NDW, without overwriting anything. Starting NDW worked immediately as is, and allowed me to use all of the Geoworks 2.0 apps as they were installed. I will say this though, do NOT attempt to switch to Motif via the setup program. It lets you select it, but it will crash to an error and then you can't get out of it as the setup program won't even load. So do not attempt to switch to Motif. If your install of 3.1 already had Motif installed it shouldn't be a problem as the file wouldn't be overwritten. Mine didn't.

Performance wise, it seems strikingly similar on an 8086. Only just a tad bit slower on 3.1 vs 2.0. But it's very hard to tell, it's fairly decent actually. My main concern is that there's no launcher creator whatsoever in 3.1, which prevents you from making icons for your DOS programs. Most likely this won't be a problem though for every user.. To me it matters a bit.

Any questions you have I'm here to answer it. But I have to be honest, this is the best software I have ever used on an 8086!
 
Ensemble is the graphical frontend I grew up on; I used it up until I migrated to OS/2 Warp in '95. I had family that used Windows 3.x and I remember wondering how it could have been considered superior. Its a very impressive piece of software, especially considering how little processing power it required to run.

I didnt learn until fairly recently that the early PC frontend for AOL was built on Ensemble. Supposedly if you have one of the old 3.5 disks with the install files, you can access a stripped-down version of Ensemble from it.
 
I just had to give up on using New Deal Office 3.2a.. It runs far too painfully slow on the 8086, not due to the CPU though, but due to using up every inch of RAM it had, and it was paging off the disk like there's no tomorrow.
 
EMDarrow said:
I didnt learn until fairly recently that the early PC frontend for AOL was built on Ensemble. Supposedly if you have one of the old 3.5 disks with the install files, you can access a stripped-down version of Ensemble from it.
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Yeah.
The AOL client also was shipped in GE 1.2 Pro as a separet application.
 
evildragon said:
I just had to give up on using New Deal Office 3.2a.. It runs far too painfully slow on the 8086, not due to the CPU though, but due to using up every inch of RAM it had, and it was paging off the disk like there's no tomorrow.
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I'm interested in GEOS/NDO because I used to use GEOS on my C128 a long time ago and I'm looking for a GIU that can run on my PC20-III (=8088) and PC40-III (=80286). I assume that 3.1 should run fine on a 8088 and 3.2 could run fine on a 80286?

But I'm also a programmer so my last question (for the moment): are there tools available for developing GUI programs for GEOS/NDO?

Many thanks in advance!
 
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