This month on Open Apple we sit down with Robert Bowdidge, one of three interns at Berkeley Softworks who ported GEOS to the best line of 8-bit computers. We talk about what a great place Berkeley Softworks was, along with the power of good tools and proper software engineering. Robert has great memories of the culture there, the GUI technology they had built, and the brilliant people who built it. Apparently GEOS existed for some other 8-bit computer as well, but we imagine it was slow and child-like. Users probably bought it at K-Mart or something.

After the interview, Mike and Quinn delve into their personal memories of GEOS, along with a couple of new projects they both did with the environment. Mike works on GEOS file conversion, and Quinn sorts out all the drivers so you don’t have to. We’re even having a contest this month! Download Quinn’s Ultimate GEOS disk image and find the secret phrase. First person to do so and email us at feedback (at) open-apple (dot) net wins nothing at all!

We also talk some news- lots of really great hardware is coming down the pipe. You won’t want to miss Javier Rivera’s hands-on with Plamen’s IIc VGA adapter, and the Uthernet II is now available. Don’t miss out! We talk some Woz, we talk some French Touch, and we revisit KansasFest yet again.

Celebrate GEOS with Quinn and Mike this Hallowe’en!

The Java-based AppleCommander disk image handling application has been updated to add support for Apple GEOS files.  According to the comp.sys.apple2 post by David Schmidt:

AppleCommander command line support has been added to properly place cc65-produced GEOS files on ProDOS images.  John Matthews has posted the 1.3.5.11 build in the AC download page:
https://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews/applecommander

This pico-release adds the -geos argument.  Given a GEOS file in Oliver’s CONVERT format:
http://wiki.cc65.org/doku.php?id=cc65:apple2:geosconvertformat

AC can be invoked like so to place that file on a disk image:

java ac.jar -geos disk.po < file.cvt

Since the CONVERT format includes a filename and other ProDOS atributes as part of the specification, there’s no need to add anything more on the command line.  If you like to do things by hand, though, you can achieve the same result this way:

java ac.jar -p disk.po foo GEO < file.cvt

Again, since the CONVERT spec includes all of the ProDOS attributes, the filename (foo) and filetype (GEO/0x82) are actually overwritten and/or ignored as part of the process.  But the presence of GEO as filetype is the thing that triggers the special GEOS handling.

While the Apple II version of GEOS was never as popular or well-supported as the Commodore variant, there are still a few within the A2 community who enjoy this early GUI.  Oliver Schmidt has taken the time to dig a little deeper into GEOS, and having discovered the secrets of the file structure, published his findings over at cc65.org.  Says Schmidt:

Although the Apple GEOS filesystem is based on ProDOS 8 the Apple GEOS files are not standard ProDOS 8 files. I’m not refering to file content here but to the file structure – meaning that Apple GEOS files aren’t seedling, sapling nor tree files.

You can read more details about the fruits of his efforts in his announcement in this comp.sys.apple2 thread.  The findings themselves are available to read here.

This morning, our good friend Bill Martens over at Call-A.P.P.L.E. announced the (re-)release of the GEOS Apple II CD.  Containing a wealth of documentation and software, this download weighs in at a hefty 140 MB.  GEOS is a graphical user interface for 8-bit computers that was originally developed and released by Berkeley SoftWorks for the Commodore 64.  Breadbox Software, current GEOS copyright holder, reclassified the Apple II version, which was originally released in 1986, as freeware thanks to the efforts of Bill and Call-A.P.P.L.E.

Visit the Call-A.P.P.L.E. article to read more about it and download the CD.