GeoWorks, Microsoft Windows' Upstart '90s Competitor (2016) | Hacker News Reader

GeoWorks, Microsoft Windows' Upstart '90s Competitor (2016)

atlasobscura.com

43 pointsandsoitis17 comments

People often talk about how fast old software is, but one of the things that stands out about GeoWorks for me is how small it was while doing a lot.

Of course, lots of things that make modern software bigger are things we very much don't want to do without--full Unicode support, accessibility, clever rendering, improvements to quality of life. But our 'foundations' are also built higher; the Web platform and a bunch of native toolkits provide a lot out of the box. (The platform doesn't include all the widgets that are now quasi-standard, of course, so we build a lot on top anyway.)

There are also a ton of useful third-party libraries you can call on without getting too bloated, and there's a lot that would have been bloated then but not now: in the 90s you probably wouldn't embed an SQL DB you didn't really need, but SQLite is a pretty safe dependency now.

Nothing in particular I'm really driving towards here but I think "how do I keep the code to functionality ratio good" can still be an interesting angle from which to look at high-level design decisions even as a lot of the circumstances and numbers have changed over decades.

Classic response to that:

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

These days it's have LLMs rewrite it in rust. </s>

Software these days compared to back then is bloated. There were memory constraints and processor constraints. If RamAltman had his way, we would likely return to needing to do that.

Tried a version in the 1990s on a lark. I recall it had theming similar to Windows 3. Yet it lacked the programs I was used to for making stuff, so I went back to Windows.

If memory serves it did perform quite well for an OS shell.

Folks who are curious about the underlying technology can see:

https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

(which I'd love to see get ported to the Raspberry Pi EDIT: or updated to make it easy to run on contemporary hardware)

It's all in x86 assembly though. "Porting" it would be a complete rewrite to ARM64.

aka just one AI prompt away

yes maybe, but also will feel completely pointless after. like a soulless one-night stand :-)

could as easily run it in an emulator

Different people code for different reasons.

For some the "point" is just solving a problem, however that happens.

For others it's an art form that gives them a sense of worth, using their knowledge and experience to do something special that not just anyone can do.

Neither is right or wrong; people just have different goals.

don't get me wrong. i've always just built for the sake of it and nerd out. and now I just... do more of it, with AI. i'm not opposed.

e.g. https://github.com/rdaum/rekursiv/ done on a whim based on a book i've had on the shelf for 25 years

it's just insane what you can get done these days.

i just think with this thing in particular, it being in x86 assembly means you're not really "porting" but rewriting. and then why that and not something else? :)

but imagine using AI to port it quickly, and then using AI to expand the feature set, refine elements, etc. That would be very satisfying to me, for example.

I am not a great programmer, and I certainly do not have the attention span to complete a big personal project. But I can describe well to Claude the architecture I want, the look and feel of the UI and how it all should work.

I have things running in my homelab which are awesome and amazing and useful and one of a kind. It is a great feeling.

I have looked at what it would take to port it to a PI Pico.

I think it would be remarkably feasible. The size and memory model is almost ideally suited.

A rp2350 with PSRAM and a SD card as a harddrive could do a quite capabLe implementation.

It's more of an architecture port than a code port because it is almost all ASM.

Wow! I remember using GEOS as a kid and not getting it. Lol

Until that point I had only run software via command line. Our first Windows machine was a few years away (386 with win 3.11).

Do be careful. The link to nokiamuseum dot info tries to download some crap

(2016)

Some previous and related discussion:

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748209

GeoWorks: The Other Windows (2019)

2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41373650

2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402609

GEOS and the like was a bit before my time, I mostly know about geoworks because back in the 2003 while in high school, I played a lot of "Wyvern" (https://web.archive.org/web/20030212212420/http://www.caboch...), an online 2d rpg game primarily made by Steve Yegge. There seemed to be significant contributions from other GeoWorks related people early on and I had noticed the name come up from time to time.

Here's some GEOS/GeoWorks related internet archaeology you may find interesting

The GEOS Software Library: https://web.archive.org/web/20021203000244/http://www.tvakat... ("Två Katter" = swedish for two cats, a play on tucows.com)

Video of the launch party for GeoWorks Ensemble 2.0 with CEO Brian Dougherty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOImkzTyJ7s "Geoworks - Brian's Got A Brand New Bag"

Steve briefly mentioning that he worked for GeoWorks, and why he thinks/thought it ultimately couldn't keep up with changes. https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-s...

>I went to the University of Washington and [then] I got hired by this company called Geoworks, doing assembly-language programming, and I did it for five years. To us, the Geoworkers, we wrote a whole operating system, the libraries, drivers, apps, you know: a desktop operating system in assembly. 8086 assembly! It wasn't even good assembly! We had four registers! [Plus the] si [register] if you counted, you know, if you counted 386, right? It was horrible.

>I mean, actually we kind of liked it. It was Object-Oriented Assembly. It's amazing what you can talk yourself into liking, which is the real irony of all this. And to us, C++ was the ultimate in Roman decadence. I mean, it was equivalent to going and vomiting so you could eat more. They had IF! We had jump CX zero! Right? They had "Objects". Well we did too, but I mean they had syntax for it, right? I mean it was all just such weeniness. And we knew that we could outperform any compiler out there because at the time, we could!

>So what happened? Well, they went bankrupt. Why? Now I'm probably disagreeing – I know for a fact that I'm disagreeing with every Geoworker out there. I'm the only one that holds this belief. But it's because we wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good tools, world class tools: trust me, you need 'em. But at some point, man...

>The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right?

>This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.

>Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!

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