OS Memories
Leave it to the folks at the UK’s PC Advisor to come up with a trip down operating system memory lane, posted on the magazine’s Web site over the weekend.
For those of us who have been around personal computers since they first hit the scene 30-something years ago, the article reads like a “greatest hits” record collection of how you used to get things done on a keyboard and monitor. I was able to recognize/remember most of the 10 OSes featured, but the one that really drew the “Oh, yeah, THAT!” reaction from me was something called GEOS.
In the 1980s, I was a happy and content Commodore 64 owner, but I didn’t like the way some of my hipper-than-thou computer geek friends would dismiss my system as nothing but a glorified video game machine with a keyboard. When GEOS came along, C64 fanboys like myself finally had something that could prove our computers could be productivity machines, too. Think of GEOS as a sort of early Microsoft Windows or MacOS overlay for the Commodore systems and you’ll get the picture. I think it initially retailed for $79.95 – a pricey piece of software for the C64 – but at that time it was really cool being able to manipulate files on a graphic desktop interface, use a font-rendering 80-column word processor and let your inner Picasso out with the paint program. You didn’t even need a mouse, as you could use the cheaper alternative of a standard nine-pin joystick controller to handle input functions.
Check out the article; you’ll be amazed at some of the facts it provides. Oh, and for the record, I remember the brief TV ad campaign for OS2 Warp in the mid ’90s and I can still operate a PC with MS-DOS command line structure.
