Re: GEOS

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

Mark Frischknecht <appleiiguy@gmail.com> wrote:

>Payton Byrd wrote:
>> Was GEOS ever sold for the Apple II?  Is it compatible with
>> applications written for GEOS for the Commodore computers?  One amazing
>> thing about GEOS 128 was it's ability to run almost all GEOS 64
>> applications right from the native 128 version of GEOS, despite the
>> drastically different hardware profile.  I'm just getting into GEOS
>> programming and my understanding was that the kernel of GEOS is the
>> kernel of GEOS is the kernel of GEOS and that applications should be
>> portable.  I know GEOS for the Commodore +/4 is supposed to run most
>> GEOS 64 applications as well, even though the only thing shared between
>> a +/4 and a 64 is the 6502 roots of their different CPUs (the +/4 uses
>> a 4510 CPU and the 64 uses the 6510 CPU).
>> 
>GEOS was produced for Apple ]][ computers. Not many commercial
>applications were sold with it. And it is not compatible with C64/128 apps.

    GEOS was never as popular on the Apple II as on the Commodore 64. 
I can remember having had a look at it in the late 80's and not being very
impressed, particularly in that you couldn't overlap or move windows. It
also had several other oddities and strange ways of doing things that 
made it unattractive to someone used to the Apple GUI (or even the
Amiga Workbench for that matter).

    There were far better GUI programs for the 8-bit Apple II: MouseDesk
(aka Apple II Desktop) was a nice rendition of the Finder, MultiScribe 
was like MacWrite, MousePaint like MacPaint (or if you wanted color,
there was 816/Paint or DazzleDraw), Publish-It! did page layout,
MouseCalc spreadsheet, ProTERM 3 telecommunications (it was
completely in Mousetext, but done excellently) just to name a few. 
And of course if you had an Apple IIGS, GEOS was of absolutely no 
value--even the earliest System Software and native applications 
blew it away.

Mitchell Spector