Why Review GEOS?
To give balance and perspective. GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It also wasn’t an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using absolute immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. The closest thing to GEOS in this modern era is MenuetOS, written entirely in x86 assembly code. GEOS came at a time before the world wide web, before home computers were PCs, before mass storage that you could afford, and long before Bill Gates and Windows were No.1. GEOS did not pioneer the GUI; most of its features were already present in the larger OSes of the day, like the classic Mac (albeit, not Windows). What GEOS did show is that cheap, low-power, commodity hardware and simple office productivity software worked. You did not need a $2000 machine to type a simple letter and print it. This gave some sense of perspective in the heady ‘
