Quote:
Originally Posted by eric11210
PC Geos was actually very, very good for its time. They could run even on an old XT computer, offered true multitasking, even with 640K of RAM and also had a full featured word processor built in with the OS which offered you something brand new at the time -- WYSIWYG. Plus, it was one of the first to have full postscript printing capability, creating laser printer quality even on dot matrix printers. All of that sounds quaint today, but if they hadn't dithered away their lead and had actively looked for third party developers to write software for the OS instead of being ridiculously cagey about it, Geos might have been the OS most computers run on today. But Microsoft caught up about a year later, had their SDK out right away and about a year before Geos finally bothered to roll something out and the rest was history. . .
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Commodore had other word processors that also were WYSIWYG. Timeworks had one that ran circles around the one in GEOS's Commodore version. GEOS hogged so much RAM, it could hold only about two and half pages of text in the word processor. Timeworks word processor could handle up to ten since it ran from DOS instead of cluttering up RAM like GEOS did. One thing the old Commodores could do that no PC since Windows has been able to do is boot up instantly. If the "monitor" was already warmed up, all I had to do was turn on the switch and the computer instantly booted. I could then load my menu program (I used it like a primitive OS) and choose whatever program I wanted. Even loading times rivaled PCs of the time when using an accelerator cartridge. Of course, there was that limited RAM thing...