As a teenager I used GEOS an awful lot from 1989 to 1994 - mainly for writing. Every single coin of money went into the expansion of that system: a REU with 512 kB, a 1581, a good 9 dot printer and most importantly an abonnement of a German group called GEOS USER CLUB. They published a magazine completely layouted using GeoPublish and sent to a laser printer resulting in absolutely breathtaking quality if you consider the source it was coming from namely said C64, an eight bit machine fighting for every single atom of RAM. Speaking of that the GUC also sold own hardware. One of their masterpieces was GeoROM, a module for the expansion port that reduced booting GEOS to a matter of switching the computer on. What a feast! It also supported a real time clock fed with the broadcast DCF signal. It altogether felt like a hyper modern personal computer - with a mouse that worked like a charme. 😊 I've still got all the original hardware at hand but haven't used it for eternities... 👀

This running on a 0.98 MHz CPU with 64 kB RAM is the absolute epitome of assembly programming skills.

[talking about geowrite, the GEOS WYSIWYG text editor] "Yeah, it's 35kb, it's pretty big".. I nearly spat out my coffee :) I just created an empty document and added the text "Hello World" using Pages on my Mac. After saving it, the _document_ size of this nearly empty document was 89kB. It's easy to forget just how efficiently things were done in the 8-bit days. I know Geowrite is comparatively feature-lite compared to anything modern, but a 38kB binary is _very_ small even for that level of functionality.

I had GEOS for my '64 and it was a game changer. In the late 80s, I could have never been able to afford an Apple computer (like I could have bought a car for the price) and this software made me feel like I had one. And it made me very productive, since all I really used the computer for was game playing. Great video, brought back lots of memories!

GEOS was later released for the PC (GEOS Ensemble). It was pretty amazing, back in the day. If Berkeley Softworks had released GEOS with GeoWrite, GeoDraw and GeoCalc on a single ROM cart for the C64, sales would have shot up through the roof.

GEOS + MPS1200 printer = One hell of a workstation. GEOS really knew how to make that printer sing. Everything I did from word processing to desktop publishing looked so professional. I was lucky to have that setup all through my school years.

I used GEOS with my c64 along with a 256k ram expansion module as a virtual drive (power dependent); it was an amazing system and gave an early taste of the future. Also had several floppy drives hooked up and I believe I was using a joystick for the cursor control. I wrote term papers for college using this software. Great software.

Great video! I used GEOS e and georWrite quite a lot at the time before switching to the Amiga, got a lot of memories back! Thanks

That was a great overview, and very educational. For me it was a great stroll down memory lane, started my computer journey on the C64 in the early 80s. A heartfelt thank you!

When this first came out, I built a light pen interface that tracked the cursor and tapping on the screen performed a left click. It was cool but I got tired of holding my arm up to the monitor real quick.

Thank you for this video. And taking me back home. I didn’t know it at the time, but I started my I T Career with the predecessor of the Commodore 64 called the VIC 20. The VIC 20 had a display size of 28? characters wide where as the Commodore 64 was 40 characters wide. Just a quick note at 22:34 you made mention of the of the scrolling option at the top of the screen. The reason for this was. Initially the Commodore 64 had a horizontal resolution (width) of 40 characters. Where as the normal printed page from the Commodore MPS 801 had horizontal resolution (width) of 80 characters. Meaning that while you were typing, you actually had too type two entire lines of text in GEOS for the program to fill up one line on a printed page. This problem was eventually solved with the introduction of the Commodore 128 computer which had a horizontal resolution (width) of a full 80 characters. The Commodore 128 also had a key on the keyboard that acted like a toggle switch in that you could change from 40 to 80 characters on the fly (provided that you had a Commodore 1902 compatible monitor which would display a native 80 characters resolution.) Also, at the time I was the president of a Commodore Users Group located in Southern California U.S.A. Before I was able too afford my first IBM PC, I became rather well versed in the entire line of Commodore computers. Starting with the Commodore PET, then the CBM, the Vic 20, the Commodore 64, the Commodore Plus 4 and 16, the Commodore 128, and finally the Amiga (which Commodore had purchased from what was a stand alone company called Amiga at the time.)

I remember doing all of this! Did my college work on GEOS on a C64 !!

It can't be overstated what a groundbreaking piece of software this was at the time for the budget home computer market. As a kid and teen there was no way you were going to be able to afford an Amiga, Mac, Windows PC or even Atari ST. Computer prices were insane back then, and you were lucky to even have the c64/128 or an old Apple II. Once your parents chose that first computer, you were stick with it. This software dramatically increased the usefulness and ease of use of these old 8bit machines that still dominated the budget home computer market and allowed them to use these machines well into the 32bit era.

Thanks much for doing this. I'm a big GEOS fan. Got me through HS and college. :) Some thoughts: 1. I think that using a 1581 as your second drive is what was causing your geoWrite and lost-drive issues. If memory serves, a 1581 needs ram expansion due to the oversized BAM. Had your second drive been a 1541, then you would have been able to do the things you wanted to without any other modifications. 2. The printer driver being moved to the first page was not just for your convenience -- it's literally how GEOS determines which printer driver to use. Had you manually moved the MPS-801 driver to the first page and then rebooted GEOS, you would have seen it as the current one. 3. I have logged SO MANY hours in GEOS and its apps, and yet you showed me things I never knew about! Thanks!

An absolutely incredible technical achievement. BTW, the disk swapping was exactly like a 128kb Mac ....

3:55 The 1351(a) driver implements mouse acceleration, so compared to the 1351 driver it moves a longer screen distance when you move the mouse quickly.

Thank you for demystifying GEOS for me. I never had a working c64, but seeing how it all worked and what strength it had for managing files vs complicated drive commands via basic load… I’m excited for the rest of this series! Especially if you cover writing your own Geos compatible app, even if it just a hello world

Had GEOS as a youngling way back when. It was somewhat easier to work with on the 128, but we didn't have a mouse and the printer we had was an OkiMate that really wasn't meant for printing documents. Printing anything took ages.

GEOS was my Commodore world from 1986 to December 1990. At some point I added GeoPublish and GeoFont. I navigated with a joystick. ;) Thank you for this wonderful video!

Great introduction! It is hard to comprehend now how mind blowing all this was back in the day. I only had a single 1541 clone and you reminded me how much disk swapping was involved. But I actually used it for real University document writing on a Citizen 120D printer. I wonder if my floppies are still readable...?

This and an Okidata 20 color thermal printer got me through 2 years of high school (87 and 88, junior and senior). Good times.

I got a copy of GEOS from Berkely for review, since I led a Commodore User Group in my home town in The Netherlands. I reviewed it for our group 'newspaper' and did a demo on a meeting. It was a great product back then, showing what the C64 could do. Back in the day, programmers had to do more with less. Even on my ZX81 I had before the C64, some amazing thjings were accomplished. These days, even for a simple program, you need gigabytes of memory and a beafy CPU or Windows won't work fast enough. Granted, it does a bit more than GEOS at the time, but still. I'm not nostalgic however. It was fun to play with it in the '80s, but I can't imagine having to work with a system like that in these days.

Excellent video. I had Geos since 1986, it was amazing for it's time. I used the writer and draw programs along with my Okidata color printer.

I was a C64 fan as an 18 year old, but that GEOS environment would have driven me crazy :) I only used it for games, and developing graphics algorithms in assembly. I never got a disk drive, was too poor at the time. (university student)

I used GEOS 2.0 for papers in my senior year in high school, and freshman in college (yes, I brought my Commodore 64 to the dorms). We knew it was slow, with the graphics refresh, printing, etc. But it was awesome!

The developers have engineered a masterpiece, squeezing every drop of performance out of the available hardware. I played with GEOS for a short time before switching over to the Amiga1000.

I had GEOS in the late 80s. At that time, it was very amazing.

HOLY MOLEY this is cool. I had forgotten about making the work disk.

Thanks for the nostalgia. Tough to follow along when you can't even find a GEOS disk that behaves the way yours do. Thanks very much really.

I used GEOS extensively back in the late 1980s. I was in high school. I wrote papers in the word processor in GEOS. I spent some hours making pictures in it's bitmap editor. It always seemed dumb to me that GEOS was not sold on a cartridge. So that at least you could have the desktop after a few seconds, rather than taking minutes to boot to a desktop just to then spent minutes loading an application. Seemed like a real missed opportunity to me. At the time, there were aftermarket mouses (mice?) that just worked like a joystick. You could plug them in and play games, but with a mouse. But those were awful in GEOS - I mean, generally they were awful, but they were particularly awful in GEOS. But the actual Commodore mouse worked differently. If you just plugged it in, it wouldn't do any joystick stuff. But it worked properly in GEOS. If you plugged the Commodore mouse in and held down the button, then it worked in joystick mode and could be used with some games (Maniac Mansion was a big one) like every other mouse and was awful in GEOS. I'm guessing that's the difference in the two different mouse profiles. I think in native mode, the Commodore mouse handled movement in a more analog way. I got a third party mouse for Christmas, probably around 1989. I took it back and traded it in towards a proper Commodore mouse which worked so much better.. for GEOS.. which was pretty much the only thing that used the Commodore mouse's native non-joystick mode. I got kicked out of my local Commodore 64 User Group for sharing a GEOS Duck Hunt style game on the BBS. It was in some C64 magazine and I spent hours typing it in. So I thought I'd share it. But the group considered that pirating... even though you could check the physical copy of the magazine out of the User Group's library and type it in yourself.

Amazing, I was just thinking of this the other day, because I was thinking of the Commodore 64 and how you didn't have to "install" software. You just loaded it into the computer from an external floppy drive each time you wanted to use it. But then GEOS popped into my mind and I recalled you had to do an initial setup, which they called "installing". I didn't recall exactly what it was, and here's this video!

So many memories! I edited my RPG fanzine in 1992 with C64 and Geos 2.0

I used this regularly on my C128 as my very first computer. Loved it.

my dad taught my computers back in like the early 90s when i was just a tot and this video is vaguely nostalgic to that. something so nice about the sounds the hardware makes as it processes and stuff. i never used this but i remember having a computer with the black and green crt screen, before finally having a windows 3.1 and eventually a 95 pc

Great video and very informing. Thank you, good sir. 👍

I'm surprised to see that it came on three discs. I think mine came in the box with the C64 itself, the disk had GEOS on side A and some kind of disk accelerator tool on the B side. This was in late 1986.

GEOS was definitely impressive, but the dead slow disk drive ruined the experience. Most people didn't have the luxury to have two drives. Today you can easily do that with VICE, or you can even attach extra memory, hard drive etc. All those things were out of question for most people back then. So GEOS was basically a showing-off thing for your friends who had a ZX Spectrum or an Amstrad CPC, and they couldn't even dream of something similar.

This was the first GUI I experienced as a kid. I think we had a 286 at the time. Fond memories.

I remember running this back in the day with the 'mouse and cheese' mouse

I LOVE MY C64 ❤❤❤❤❤ FOREVER ❤❤❤❤

Writer seems super impressive for c64

Great video! It helped me a lot getting GEOS installed and running on my MEGA65 (with C64 core). Creating workdisks was a bit unclear to me, as is using REU. Can’t wait for the second video. Great work.

The combination of GEOS and an 80 column card could not be beat at the time

A double sided disk formatted to be used on a single sided drive/system/os is called a flippy disk

Great video, thank you. In addition to the transition to Wheels, which I am looking forward to seeing, I would be really interested to see something about the development of applications designed especially for GEOS, as I am sure there was software for development, a compiler or something similar, back then. (geoProgrammer, perhaps?..) Thank you very much, you are rekindling a fire that was extinguished many years ago!

I remember GEO very well, but was too young to understand it properly and destroyed multiple disks filling them up with bad drawings. It wasnt something that was used by my parents much. i do remember my mother doing a lot of word processing but she never used GEOS and looking at this im not sure why, possibly file sizes. i do remember her using a different stand alone processor which i remember was almost like programming in html as she used to have to had format literally everything in code from margins to font types to sizes.... shes.... not the brightest spark but she had been through a full secretaries course at some stage as my granddad decided she was going to be a secretary so to this day she can still write fluently in pitmans shorthand which is a whole other language in itself.

My dad bought a cheap 386 in 1992. (It wasn't all that cheap actually). It had MS Dos and GEOS. The one with the moon backdrop. It was kinda neat. I also remember using deskmate on the tandy 1000.

Got a new sub from me. Watches feim beginning ti end without skipping and really enjoyed it. Cant wait for the follow up video.

Better than any Window since Vista and most 'modern' Linxu desktops for sure.

Yeah, the good old times when we made fun of PC users because we had a GUI and they had.... MS-DOS 2.11, monochrome screens and no mouse.

Great video. Looking forward to pt. 2!

Great video, thanks a bunch

Very interesting! Many Thanks!

Used Geos on a Laser 128!

Back-in-the-day, we didn't call it Gee Ahs.. more commonly pronounced Gee Ohs.. which makes more sense.. OS.. Other add-ons were GEOFile and GEOPaint. They would sound funny Gee Ah prefix pronunciation.

Nice. Brings back memories for me as well. Where can you get the d64 images for GEOS?

I remember using that before I'd heard of Windows or Mac but I used it also on a pc

When I bought my second C64 to replace my fried first one (I have over 20 now), it came with GEOS 1.2 and I thought that was a really cool system. It influenced me to buy a mouse and that made it so much easier to use. Eventually for whatever reason I bought GEOS 2.0 and that was such a nice upgrade. But two huge game changers were starting to use a second 1541, and installing JiffyDOS. Those made the whole thing so much faster to use! I don’t know why you’re not seeing the ability to change drives to load a file in GeoWrite because that works on my system. Of course, it’s been a very long time since I’ve used GEOS so I can’t remember specifics. I didn’t even remember that you need to copy the config file to all the work disks. Anyway, one another really nice thing is how much support LoadStar had for GEOS with dozens of new fonts and other applications like a graphics converter for importing pictures from Doodle or wherever. I really need to go through my GEOS and LoadStar disks again to see what all is there and what I haven’t even seen yet.

Was amazing and sold with the 64c. There was a PC version, in around the Introduction of Windows, whilst OS/2, etc. Was being sorted out. Interesting thing like OS/2, capable of Long FileNames. I have seen it. Wasn't to expensive either. Even supported Ram expansions. These guys did Printmaster, which was in a lot of ways better than the Printshop program by Broderbund back then. Then again, all this was amazing at the time. :) 128 version, Database, sold as an extra. Ahead of it's time really, always feel TOS on the ST, was not as good. :) I also had a Final Cartridge 3, which had a GUI.

One major problem was that people just wouldn't have a 1581 drive back in the day...! They were MASSIVELY expeisive, at least here in Scandinavia...! My dad started out with a C64 breadbin with a 1541-I drive. As soon as the C128 came out, he upgraded to that, including a 1571 drive. It wasn't a huge improvement, but it helped. I remember how excited I was the first time I was told how to use a fast loader to load classics as Outrun, Falcon Patrol, H.E.R.O. and Summer Games :-) My first experience with 3,5 inch disks came with the A2000... -but that isn't relevant here. We actually ran GEOS from the 1571 drive in C128 mode, and I remember the "Boot" icon well...! It was worlds away from the command line of the booooring PCs....!

I remember having this for my C64 but had no idea what an Operating System was. I just thought it was a convoluted way of starting a Paint program. lol

Great video as always! 👍💥 Keep up the good work!

Take a look at the new C64 OS too, it was released just recently. Geos may have been impressive, but it had little practical use. There were better standalone programs for everything that didn't waste the precious resources of the little computer.

As you've experienced, "back in the day", the disk swapping required with a basic system was bit of nightmare. GEOS on the C64 was very much a "proof of concept" application - that said it was way more reliable and crashed less than the GUI on a early Macintosh. But there were still problems - it was in 40 columns, not 80 and it was slow to use - as GEOWRITE demonstrated and the output on a printer didn't look great as it printed in graphics mode. GEOS128 was better, but it still wasn't as fast or efficient as say Superscript 128 (a word processing program) when it came to just getting things done. That said GEOS works very well with a SD2IEC where everything can be one one drive.

What a unique operating system

New Sub! Dryden, Mich. Well done, Lets see what else ya got~!

GEOS was amazing back in the day.

Thank you for this video! I miss retro content like that: a guide how retro software & hardware really worked in real life. Most videos are focused on retro games only. From this video alone: GEOS indeed was very impressive, basically clone of early Mac OS but implemented on "half" of the hardware. Many things is copied: how files works, desktop "gadgets" to mitigate lack of multitasking. I'm surprised though that calculator can't be moved? Are you sure? Maybe there's way to do that? Or maybe windows are not movable at all?

Didn't they convert GEOS as an OS for the PC back in 1989 or so? I would like to see how that version performed if it did this well on a 64k machine!!

I was playing with GEOS in mid 90s and even then I concluded the C64 was simply too slow to draw the bitmapped GUI at reasonable speed especially in GeoWrite/Publish. Which kinda proved a few years later with Pentium PC where Word was finally usable for writing and printing previews lol.

The lion kingdom only used geowrite & geopaint. There were many tries to boot just those without going through the desktop program. As a modern command line aficionado, it would have been far better if the apps were standalone, but graphical file managers were as essential to marketing in those days as the word GPT today. Wish there was an interview with the GEOS developers.

You will hear the disk drive head moving much faster after GEOS starts booting. That is a simple setting in the drive. They were also using a fast loader, otherwise the experience would have been truly unbearable.

I remember messing around with GEOS when I got my 64... Determined that it was just too much work and not enough game play and quickly abondoned it lol

I feel like if they were less aggressive about the copy protection (and i know why they would be concerned and understand why they would use it, but...) they might've had a better foothold when competing against the various other OSes/platforms of the era. Macs are trendy now but back in the day they weren't doing so hot and Microsoft's easy to defeat copy protection allowed for a lot of people to get hooked onto the OS so that when Windows 95 rolled around, people were very excited to buy their first legitimate copy of the OS and were celebrating that fact.

had this in the 80s on my c64, always pronounced it wrong though. gee - o's

I so enjoyed your videos. Particularly Part 1. You have inspired me to use Vice 3.8. Everything is good except mouse wont work in 128, only 64. I tried all the obvious changes with no luck. Any thoughts? Thanks!

People had so much more patience then 😂 I am not sure what's more impressive, the fact this was done on an 8 bit micro with 64 Kb of RAM, or your patience going through this even on a virtual emulation and the disk juggling. Next time I complain about my mac taking 20 seconds to boot I will remember this video. 😊

❤

With C128s two head floppy disk drive GEOS works better (less swaping off coz). I saw some old footages with GEOS launched on original hard disk drive for C64 and it was a big deal back then...

When is the next video? Refresh...refresh...!

I ran GEOS on the Apple II

A note.. A space between LOAD and " isn't needed. All you gotta do is: LOAD"*",8,1 and there you go. I'm curious as to why you keep saying it wants another disk, when we can see it? It is really weird to hear anything with a C64 called an App. We called them programs. One of the things I loved about the Commodore 64, 128, and so on.. You either learned about calmness, and living in the moment or you became irritated. Using a 300 baud modem would be so difficult for people will Cellphones now. HA!! Faster loaders were nice but a slower pace was still really sweet. You had to think things through. I laughed a bit, but I also enjoyed the video. I love the speed of the Internet today, but I'm also still very aware of calmness.

I just saw something called SymbOS for MSX computers. I've never heard of it before. It looks very advanced compared with what was available at the time. It looks like Windows??

GEOS rules OK

I was a heavy GEOS 64 user in the 80s. Now you’ve got me curious how GEOS 64 performance compares to GEOS 128, and GEOS for the Apple II. Maybe I’d have been better getting the (actually pretty awesome, according to the 8-Bit Guy) Laser 128 Apple II clone, and running Apple II GEOS on that. If have had double the RAM, vastly faster drives, and would have gained Apple II contributory. I couldn’t have afforded an actual Apple II, nor a Commodore 128 and 1571 drive, not a C128D, but I maybe could have afforded that. Would have been worth considering, at least. Why the Laser 128? Much cheaper than an actual Apple, and PC/GEOS was still a ways off.

Programmers back then were made of a different kind of code.

It was more a prove of concept than anything else, it wasn't really something that you could use for real, everyone was just using the command line, fast and memory efficient. But it was still incredible that it could even be done on a C64.

Hi, awesome video! I was wondering where you got the file for the disk with geowrite, geopaint and the calculator all together from as i cant find it. Thanks!

Where is the floppy sound coming from? You are using an emulator, right?

Wonderful! Do anyone know of a OS like this as source in some language, preferably C?

I had GEOS.

👍👍👍👍💻💻💻💻

This was a big deal back then. I still have my original copies and my 64 and my 64C.

My question (as a regular C-64 user of that day): Has anyone used Geos for real, productive work?

Amber screen , floppy square limp discs . Loud Dexter's Laboratory Sound effects .

Any chance you share with us the .d64/.g64 you use so that we can reproduce the experiment ? :) Thanks !

Is the sound of the floppy disc simulated?

I had to throw away my PC and all of the software on my PC because we moved so much . I accidentally put in the product key by mashing keys at random .

Looks an awful lot like Atari TOS to me.

Weird, we called it Gee-Ose not Gee-oss as you do.