Submitted by Profile_Salty t3_10jo4vw in todayilearned
Right? - It was less buggy, and just as functional as Windows95 IMO, with integration between the word/excel equivalents
And way ahead of its time, that was 1988
Back then, there was the Microsoft Works suite, but businesses typically used word perfect, lotus 1-2-3, and dBASE.
I still have my Commodore 64. With two floppy disc drives, monitor, phone modem and dot matrix printer (yes, I said dot matrix). And it still runs.
We still had a half dozen C64s running in my elementary school in the mid 90s, I'm still impressed with what they could do.
In the mid-1980s we had PET computers, the forerunner of the C64. I ended up writing an interactive program that simulated a fake login into the school district mainframe where it simulated allowing you to change your grades, just like in War Games. A few laughs were had with several groups of gullible kids. A few people freaked out over it. Fun times.
Ever since VICE (a C64 emulator) was released about 20-25 years ago, I ended up abandoning all my hardware. Gave it all away. The emulators are just fantastic, and I have all my disk images saved as .d64 files, so I'm not missing out on anything.
I still have my VIC-20 around somewhere, and I feel nostalgic every time I see it. The first week I owned it was an amazing time... couldn't wait to get home from school and play around on it.
Amazing. Does the phone modem work? What do you dial into? Can you get cartridges for the printer?
I also have one, but no 154x drives, just cartridges--including modern ones that let you use microsd cards with disk images on them. People are still developing software and hardware for them. You can get wifi modems (I don't have one yet), and there are Commodore BBSes on the Internet.
Someone released a Super Mario Brothers port about four years ago.
Wow, I didn't realize there were still BBSs out there. I spent a lot of time on those in the 90s. My Commodore 64 was gone by then, but was rocking a Pentium II. I remember I had this crappy xeroxed copy of all the non-long distance BBSs in my area that I would plow through to find new ones whenever my favorites were giving me the busy signal. Sometimes they were already gone, and someone would answer the phone/modem! I miss those "simpler" times.
I think my first was The Tardis BBS, run by The Doctor on his Commodore 128 in Valdosta, Georgia in 1983. It was a fun community. (In 1983 it was still running on his Commodore 64, though.) [edited to add the parenthetical]
For the mods, this software has been discontinued decades ago, so hope this does not fall under Rule #7.
So tortuously slow and clunky, but looked good. I think I did my resume on it, though, WYSIWYG! and printed it out with fonts! on my Okidata dot matrix printer.
I think it took about 2 1/2 minutes to load from 3 or 4 disks
You needed a ram expansion to really get the best use out of it, but it really is amazing that they managed to squeeze an entire graphical operating system into only 64KB. It was slow, but it worked, and worked well. With a ram expansion, it flew.
My school had the old Mac computers in the computer lab, I would use them and then I'd come home and fire up GEOS and the experience and even the look was almost exactly the same. From 16MHz 512KB/1MB Mac's to the C64 with a CPU speed of less than 1MHz and 64KB of ram.
The only other possible contender would have been the OS ran by Tandy COCOs, but they were largely going downhill by 1988. Linux was first released in 1991 (per wikipedia).
Apple had a sales program called "Apple for Teachers", which was a discount program designed to get teachers to buy into the Apple/Mac ecosystem. They had a unique position over Microsoft in that they sold the hardware and operating system as a package (that only they could sell). There were several early manufacturers of PCs, including IBM, Zenith, Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and a myriad of private label store brands (they might not all have existed in 1988, but they were close).
GEOS was when I went from printing out the terrible line-by-line documents on a $200 Okidata dot matrix printer to printing out whatever fonts could be displayed on the screen. GEOS rendered the entire document (fonts, etc) like a graphics image and spooled it out to the printer. This was the cutting edge of things until the mid-1990s when laser and inkjet printers became affordable.
It sucks there's no good examples on the Internet of what GEOS was capable of, all I see is screenshots, but it was definitely revolutionary for its time.
Interestingly The Newsroom provided some of the same document capabilities a year before GEOS, but I guess they didn't see the broader potential for document design. The Newsroom just did newsletters, but it was a fantastic program and made great use of a large clip art stock.
Talk about a nostalgia bomb!
Also "Desk Top" icon lololol
Making me feel all fuzzy
I didn’t have this for my c64, but I did have Double Dragon and Marble Madness for it! Played on an atari joystick.
Black with the red lever?
If I recall it was a black lever with a red button. I seem to recall it being hexagonal instead of cylindrical, if that makes sense.
After porting the image to an Amiga and then further I still have at least one image saved somewhere drawn with Geopaint. It was amazing what could be squeezed out of a C64.
[removed]
I had Geoworks, its successor, and loved it.
BitsAndAss t1_j5lko45 wrote
GEOS was gorgeous for the time. Memories.