8-bit GEOS nostalgia: my first Graphical User Interface still lives

In a previous post, "A tale of 4 computers,"  I waxed nostalgic on the early history of my involvement with computers. In it I mentioned Geoworks, a graphical user environment for the Commodore 64 (and later an enhanced version for the Commodore 128) that I used as my first GUI. GEOS was incredible, bringing early Mac-like functionality, printer support and a full GUI environment to a very affordable computer platform. The included word processor was quite nice and supported bitmapped output to my Commodore 1526 dot matrix printer.

GEOS 128 for the Commodore 128 supported much higher resolution and double the processor speed available in the machines 128-mode. I think my favorite program for the machine was GeoPublish. Many of my friends from high school and college still have cassettes with covers made using this technology.

My parents first bought a DOS machine (with an amber display) in the days before Windows existed. I put GEOS on that system and they used it for many years. GEOS for the IBM PC ran circles around other software solutions (especially those early attempts at the mouse paradigm). Windows 1.0 (and probably 2.0) were nothing compared to this product.

GEOS was incredibly tight code and a very affordable product that I still admire today. So I was surprised to see that the product is still alive and well (even recently releasing a presentation program, GEOPoint!) at Breadbox.com. Reading the site it is clear they are still doing a little business with GEOS serving the education market and making ancient hardware donations useful. GEOS also was the OS in Nokia smartphones prior to Simbian.

Makes me happy to see GEOS is still out and about!