What Took so Long?

[eric11210]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Geos on the Commodores was a bloated piece of junk from the word go.

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. . .

[eric11210]

Originally Posted by corona

The big secret: they all run on CP/M.

Okay, quick test of geek credentials: how many people know what CP/M is? Hint: Microsoft aped it in order to get rich.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by eric11210

Okay, quick test of geek credentials: how many people know what CP/M is? Hint: Microsoft aped it in order to get rich.

It's an early OS.

[amoroso]

Originally Posted by eric11210

Okay, quick test of geek credentials: how many people know what CP/M is?

PIP

I'm adding some text because, when I tried to preview only the above, I got the warning "The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 5 characters."

[Lady Fitzgerald]

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. . .

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...

[amoroso]

Originally Posted by thymaster

But why did it take digital books so long to emerge?

I read that one of the reasons of the limited success of early reading devices was their use of proprietary file formats and the few available titles, which most of the time had to be purchased from the device vendor bookshop.

[J. Strnad]

Control Program for Microprocessors. My first computer was a Televideo running CP/M, with 8" floppy drives. Twelve-inch green screen. It had a treadle like an old sewing machine. (Okay, just kidding about the treadle.)

I hear that it is possible to strip DRM, but whenever I research the subject, the discussion zooms off into "running Python scripts" and other stuff that's over my head. Given that most people are even less computer savvy than I am, I don't consider stripping DRM to be a practical answer to the issue of ebook compatibility. It has to go away at the source.

And geographic restrictions are just nuts. I can see controlling versions in different languages, but we're a global village now and anybody ought to be able to buy, say, an English-language version of a book anywhere in the world. Jeez, we aren't traveling salesmen with trunks of books who need to stake out our territories anymore!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by eric11210

Okay, quick test of geek credentials: how many people know what CP/M is? Hint: Microsoft aped it in order to get rich.

I used to run concurrent CP/M on a very early IBM PC. That was a seriously cool o/s.

[Fbone]

And B&N sold ebooks back in 2001 but discontinued a year or so later. The consumer wasnt ready for it yet and probably had other things on their mind like 9-11.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by eric11210

Okay, quick test of geek credentials: how many people know what CP/M is? Hint: Microsoft aped it in order to get rich.

I started design work as a very green junior engineer using CP/M and basic86. How our design tools have changed!