It is probably safe to assume that those who never owned a Commodore 64 look back on it as either a game machine, a music maker, a crude programming tool, or some mixture of those things.  The C64 had its share of productivity, business and art tools, however, and one major platform for more "serious" C64 owners was GEOS, the Graphic Environment Operating System from Berkeley Softworks, released in 1986.


Prior to GEOS there was a Commodore cartridge called "Magic Desk" that was a rather crude but serviceable attempt at an all-around productivity suite GUI that resembled a real office with a desk, typewriter, filing cabinets and more.  Prior to owning GEOS, I used Magic Desk for typing documents, but it was hardly the sort of snappy text entry we take for granted today.

Instead of the almost comical design of Commodore's Magic Desk, GEOS looked very much like the desktop GUI of a Macintosh, and was designed as a modern OS to be a platform for running many applications, not a limited handful.

The redesigned C64c was often bundled with GEOS, making it a viable, if much cheaper, alternative to computers like the Macintosh.

While the Commodore 1351 mouse was supported by GEOS, I suspect many C64 owners used their joysticks instead, as I did.

GEOS was a fantastic achievement when one considers the limitations of the hardware, but it was not without its flaws.  The slow processor speed and load times made long term survivability of the platform an issue.  The C128 also had a version of GEOS that should have been snappier, perhaps a key reason for owning a C128 back in the day as C128 specific games were few compared to the thousands made for the C64.

I fondly recall perhaps the best feature of GEOS, which was the WYSIWYG word processor "geoWrite".  Up until geoWrite, typing on the C64 and producing decently formatted rows of readable text was a chore.  I was a bit shocked when years later I found an expensive Fujitsu FM-Towns word processor ("Word Star"?) that was actually not WYSIWYG!

I also recall one of my teachers marking my documents full of red text because the printer I used with my C64 was a dot matrix type that did not have descending lines in "y" characters --- the educator docked me points for the way the printer displayed characters!  So much for being on the cutting edge of home computer use, apparently I was supposed to use a typewriter, or perhaps an expensive Apple printer that GEOS actually did support.

Several versions of GEOS were released over more than 10 years, each improving on the last in what would be considered major ways today (adding essential driver support for popular devices, color, resizable windows, etc.).

GEOS is not lost and forgotten and can be downloaded and even bought today.  It is likely that the GEOS users of today beyond those who just "like it" include people who made extensive use of it in the past and still have many documents and CG "paintings" in a GEOS readable format.  It is also possible to use emulation to speed up GEOS so it overcomes the limitations of the old hardware.

One more novel use of GEOS is on the Nintendo DS.  Watch the video below and I think you'll agree that GEOS may have found its niche (and a reason to survive) on handheld devices like this.

To read more about GEOS, check out the GEOS FAQ.

To download GEOS and try it out, go HERE.