“Wireless software pioneer Geoworks Corp has thrown in the towel, giving up hope of developing its AirBoss application platform technology and has put it up for sale along with the source code for its GEOS and GEOS-SC operating systems. The Alameda, California-based company said the wireless infrastructure market is “very weak” and, while it will eventually be significant as enterprises adopt mobile data applications, Geoworks simply does not have the financial resources to support development of the AirBoss platform and wait for the market to emerge.” Read the rest of the story at TheRegister.
Geoworks Throws in Towel and Puts GEOS up for Sale
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This is another case of bad management. A company should document itself well enough to be able to go into hibernation by dramaticaly scale down until market condition of required missing technology (most time, relating to manufacturing cost) came up.
There is no market condition for WAP browser technology — WAP was a dead-on-arrival technology.
>>This is another case of bad management.
Easy to pass judgement ain’t it?
>>A company should document itself…
Easier said than done!
I hope they find a buyer but it’s gonna be tough. The fact that MSFT, Symbian, and Palm are superior doesn’t help any.
ciao
yc
I remember GEOS back in the day. Worked kinda like Win3.1 running over DOS. (That part of it is now repackaged as New Deal Office, which is a pretty slick package for your old boxen.) Also, GEOS was kind of a pioneer in this type of technology. Anyone remember when the Nokia Communicator 9000 first came out? Remember seeing Val Kilmer use it in The Saint? That was pretty slick back in the day, albeit old now, and not moving as fast as the other competitors in the field are. It’s a shame to see them go, but I think we ought to acknowledge they technology they had, and for being one of the first. In my eyes, they rank up there with QSSL (i.e. QNX), Palm, and Amiga for being some awesome companies. Some are still making advances, and others fell behind.
— Rob
I used to use GEOS back in the days of Win 3.1. Compared to Win 3.1, it used a lot less RAM, was 100x more stable, was generally faster, and wasn’t quite so damn ugly. I remember there even being an AOL GUI client for it. Alas!
>kinda like Win3.1 running over DOS
Nah, more like Windows 95 and Office 95 over DOS. In reality, GEOS / New Deal actually used less of DOS than Windows 9x does. The only use GEOS had for DOS was the file system structure – You basically could have installed it, and had it work (nearly) flawlessy on a hard disk drive that had ben partitioned FAT 16, and formatted using the /s switch. Try that with 3.x. Most OS afficiandos (including myself) Consider it to be a full-fledged OS.
Too bad that Geoworks never had the <cojones> to compete with Microsoft. Like another company we all knew and loved – they moved into a nascent market much too soon, completely ignoring their desktop customers, and paid the price. Sure, the OS survived and improved as New Deal Office, but it still is a 16 bit OS today. A remarkable piece of engineering in its’ time, but a dinosaur today. Rumor has it that a 32-bit version exists, but no one that I know has ever seen it.
I’d just love to get my hands on that source code, tweak it, and recompile it for 32 bit processors. And port open office. Oh well, just a pipe dream
Geoworks has ALWAYS been mismanaged. They kept changing their focus so many times over the years. It’s probably been 5-6 years since they’ve touched the GEOS code. They’re selling it because everyone that licensed the code from them either moved on to something else (Nokia) or went out of business (NewDeal, MyTurn…). Yeah, Breadbox (www.breadbox.com) just licensed it from them, but they’re such a small company that they probably got the license for pennies. And I don’t think anyone ever cared about GEOS-SC (which had nothing in common with GEOS other than the name); the only surprise is they waited this long to try to sell it.
[Background info: I’ve written code for most GEOS platforms, had an internship offer from Geoworks when I was in high school, and worked for Breadbox, NewDeal, and MyTurn over the past 7 years or so…]
What sad news. I used GEOS on my Commodore 128. It’s similarities to Classic Macs are amazing.
There is no market condition for WAP browser technology — WAP was a dead-on-arrival technology
Mostly true, the market is dominated by two companies Nokia and OpenWave. In my opinion OpenWave makes the best browsers (UP.Browser).
There’s more to wireless than WAP though, you have PDAs, iMode/e-plus, and wap. I think GEOS was an attempt to apply PDA like technology to phones which generally doesn’t work well though the Handspring Treo is looking promising.
>>Sure, the OS survived and improved as New Deal Office, but it still is a 16 bit OS today. A remarkable piece of engineering in its’ time, but a dinosaur today. Rumor has it that a 32-bit version exists, but no one that I know has ever seen it.
Work was in progress to run in protected mode, but MyTurn and NewDeal both ran out of money about a year ago, so that killed development. The system booted up in protected mode, and I know the browser worked. I didn’t hear about anything else, I just know a lot of things were getting tweaked.
>>I’d just love to get my hands on that source code, tweak it, and recompile it for 32 bit processors. And port open office. Oh well, just a pipe dream
It’s not just a tweak or recompile. 95% of the code tree is in assembly; the internet apps are all in C, but other than that there isn’t much in C. And everything was REALLY tightly coded to run well in 640k, so, its not easy upgrading it. But the code was REALLY well written. It was a pleasure to work on, much more so than most code I’ve seen for other OS’s, regardless of the language.
>>It’s not just a tweak or recompile. 95% of the code tree is in assembly.
Ouch. I just assumed it was C code – it’s a bitch to do GUI stuff in assembly. Guess I just assumed. And you know what that means….
now let’s put some links to the source code! i wanna look at it. i would really appreciate any help
thanks!
>> Ouch. I just assumed it was C code – it’s a bitch to do GUI stuff in assembly. Guess I just assumed. And you know what that means….
Actually, it’s not. Geoworks wrote their own assembler that pisses all over NASM or anything else I’ve seen. It makes asm coding a lot easier. Got good support for structs, plus, they added OO for the GUI stuff. You can predeclare your UI objects in the source, in a nice really easy syntax. Trust me, GEOS coding in assembly is much easier than working with MFC.
Damn, Ed. You sure know your GEOS Stuff. Maybe we should chip in and license the source code. I’d love to see a modern GEOS.
Ed, it’s a real pleasure “meeting” you again.
I had my hands in GEOS back in 1995-1997, trying to redistribute it in S. Africa, but the people in charge of the code were never the brightest when it came to marketing. Common malaise, I hasten to add.
GEOS lacked a proper visual IDE, and the 16bit-ness didn’t help either. And when Nokia dropped it in favour of Symbian, the writing was on the wall.
I largely agree with Ed, because from a user perspective GEOS offered the most consistent and friendly computing experience, with 4 user levels, a coherent and really neat UI, many features only found in high-end apps, and well… on a 486 with 32MB RAM I ran it on a RAM disk at a speed that you know…
Safely referencing documents, fonts and help files to the had disk via 3 lines in the GEOS.INI, the thing was a speed daemon second to none!
It’s one of the really sad examples in OS history, because it was ways ahead of Windows and other operating systems, but bad marketing, insufficient developer support and lack of adoption by OEMs eventually killed it.
I don’t know what Breadbox wants to do to remove all these bottlenecks and catch up, even if their target market remains the low end and schools, but all strengths to them!
Helmar