From the press release: Under the terms of an amended licensing agreement with Geoworks of Emeryville, California, effective April 1, 2003, Breadbox Computer Company, LLC of Port Richey, Florida, has obtained the worldwide exclusive and perpetual rights to the patented Geos operating system for all hardware platforms.As part of the agreement and in addition to undisclosed financial and other terms, Breadbox has agreed to take on certain of Geoworks’ technical support liabilities to third parties. In addition, under the terms of the agreement, all ownership rights of the Geos operating system will pass to Breadbox at an undisclosed date. Prior to the ownership transfer, Breadbox has the right to bring claims against third parties for violations of Geoworks’ intellectual property rights in the licensed technology. “We are very pleased to have reached an amicable agreement with Geoworks and we look forward to our continuing role as the keeper of the Geos flame. With a little luck and our continued perseverance and talented Breadbox team, we aim to put Geos back on the map as a viable alternative. Geos has a long standing history of being on the cutting edge and of being the software of choice for the first PDA, the Casio Zoomer, and later the Hewlett Packard OmniGo and others; the first PDN, the Brother GeoBook; the first wireless Communicator, the Nokia 9000; the award winning PC desktop software that still runs nicely on a 386; and much, much more. We will revive and continue this legacy into the future” stated Frank S. Fischer, President & CEO of Breadbox.
Breadbox Obtains Worldwide Exclusive Geos Rights
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It’s a shame that Microsoft’s GUI prevailed over Geoworks. It really was a nice environment for its day.
if i remember correctly AOL used the geoworks API (or somthing like that) to build the first version of AOL on dos. AOL 1.6 i beleve. that was my only email for about 4 years.
just a historical note.
I did use GEOS the OS for the C64 with a nice GUI several years ago, which were developed be Geoworks. Can someone tell me if this is the same company or OS?
“Can someone tell me if this is the same company or OS?”
Breadbox bought GeOS a while back. Geoworks is still in business, but no longer involved with GeOS. The current incarnation of GeOS is named Breadbox Ensemble, and before that it was “NewDeal Office.”
I just wish it was available as a free download. I have a 386 computer I’d like to use it on, but it doesn’t make sense to pay $100 for software to use on a $10 machine…
-Bob
its cool that you can run their software on a 386. but is that really relevant anymore. I noticed that they were trying to use the low resource requirements to market themselves as a viable OS/Application choice for the educational market. you can run strains of Linux and *BSD on such hardware. So why would a school choose their software, which has absolutely no industry acceptance over a free *NIX + OSS. Not only is the latter combination free, but UNIX is an industry standard and the kids would be learning much more relevant skills.
And it was really swell; it felt a bit like CDE. The thing that really made it stand out, besides running on a 286 (and being nicer than Tandy’s Deskview) was that you could do amazingly nice printing with your crummy dot matrix; it would take forever for it to go over each line, but it was worth it.
I had a terrible DMP-105, which was a SEVEN pin printer; not even nine. The documents looked great, though they would eat through ribbons.
One place I went to work for had all of their company’s data stored in the Geoworks Ensemble database. This was not a good situation. They did it, though, because it worked for them, and they really liked it.
I look forward to seeing this again. I don’t know much about the internals, but the interface was nice.
Is this thing (what thing? I don’t know…) a graphical shell that would run on top of DOS, or a full OS?
Did I see this in the early Ventura Publisher? Did they use GeoWorks?
Is GeoWorks the OS or is it GeOS? What is GeoWorks?
ut
No need to explain. I went to the website and I still don’t know what it is, how much it costs or how to get it. I found some software for download. But, not what I might expect.
Maybe I’m overlooking something, as well.
The first client was for GEOS IIRC – aol.exe. That’s why to this day the windows client is waol.exe
My memory is now very fuzzy but I believe GeoWorks did have its roots in the C64. Round about 1990 I almost got involved with a project based on GeoWorks so I got to study its API which was pretty OOP based IIRC. GeoWorks got some great mag reviews. I think it used pre-emptive multitasking and did not sit on DOS. Competitors like Quarterdeck’s Desqview was also very interesting except I never saw any Desqview apps.
Wonder if I can find that API and that mag review somewhere in my basement.
i like geos i have new deal version 3.2
email me [email protected] i can show u a link where
u can get geos.
new deal had geos for like 2 years
I meant Deskmate, not Deskview.
Some people are claiming that Breadbox/New Deal has had GEOS for years. They have in some capacity. However, this announcement does contain new goodies- they now are the exclusive owners of GEOS and GEOS-based products. Before, they weren’t. Before Breadbox got New Deal, New Deal, Breadbox and other companies had GEOS licenses. New Deal Office wasn’t owned and maintained by GeoWorks.
GEOS and GeoWorks Ensemble are/were pretty damn cool. I used to use it all the time for AOL and otherwise on 286 and 386 machines back in the day. I switched to OS/2 and DesqView in DOS later. GEOS sucked for multitasking… Not everything, but like Win3.1, you couldn’t have a DOS window with Procomm Plus downloading a file and do anything else at the same time without the download almost stopping.
GEOS uses a pretty interesting OOP system that is a combination of C and a pre-processor. From what I’ve heard it’s pretty nice to code for, especially when you look at what else there was rivaling it in those days- Win16 API (EWW!), Mac ToolBox (well, at least it’s not hell), and Xlib or Motif. Now a days we have better desktop APIs like Cocoa (and since ’93, NeXTSTEP), but it was impressive for its day.
Here´s quite a lot information about Geos and its history:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/9020/geos/history.htm
geos could have been big, they could have muscled in on where symbian is now had they played their cards right.
geos/c64, geoworks, etc. very promising.
After replacing my C64s kernal many years ago for a Jiffy-DOS one, GeOS worked like a dream on top of that – I just wonder how the newer version is after x years, anyone know?
Mario wrote:
> Did I see this in the early Ventura Publisher? Did they use
> GeoWorks?
No, this was GEM for x86.
Yes, now that you mention it, I recall GEM as a foggy concept. What happened with that? Is that what Caldera opensourced a couple of years ago?
Jep, i think so. You can still download it at:
http://www.deltasoft.com/downloads.htm ,
but AFAIK VP was the only “real” application for it.
I didn’t see the NewDeal Basic listed anywhere. Does BreadBox have the rights to it, too?
I was under the impression that Breadbox Ensemble was a stand-alone operating system with an integrated office suite. But I’ve seen reference to running it with DOS, and a bugfix for XP.
Some of the earlier posts had similar questions about the basic nature of the product. Can someone comment?
-Bob
Bobthearch wrote:
> I was under the impression that Breadbox Ensemble
> was a stand-alone operating system with an integrated
> office suite.
> But I’ve seen reference to running it with DOS, and a
> bugfix for XP.
Well, i can only speak for “NewDeal Office” (the old name). This is not an operating system like MacOS or *BSD, it is like a graphical shell for programs (a la Win3.1/WfW3.11). You still need something like DOS (or a DOS emulation) to let it run. Integrated is a program for painting pictures, a webbrowser, a simple mailprogram and a text application like SimpleText. Other third party programs may exist, i never found them on the internet.
BTW: Here at my office is a 8086-PC with Hercules graphics (two beautiful colors), 640kb RAM, a ten megabyte MFM harddrive and MS-DOS 3. A `just for fun´-installation of the trial version of “NewDeal Office” on this old iron brings a (well, kind of) useable graphical enviroment. Only printing is really slow because the swapfile is created on the harddrive.
A simple sys C: from a floppy boot disk is enough for GEOS/GeoWorks/NDO/Breadbox to operate. GEOS and it’s successors require far less of DOS than Windows 9x ever did.