Berkeley Softworks

» see geoworks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Brian Dougherty had already done one company. He left Mattel Electronics to co-found Imagic in Los Gatos in 1981 with other Mattel and Atari people, raised two million dollars, watched it work, and then watched the 1983 video game crash take the whole business down. He came out of it with about a hundred thousand dollars in net worth and incorporated The Softworks that same year, two blocks from UC Berkeley where he had been a student. It took the name Berkeley Softworks in 1984 and began by shipping games for the Apple II and the C64.

In 1985 the company started on the thing it is remembered for. Industry analysts had written the Commodore 64 off as obsolete against the IBM PC and the Macintosh, so Berkeley Softworks set out to build a graphical operating system that would extend the machine's life instead. GEOS shipped in 1986 with a mouse-driven desktop and a word processor that reviewers compared to MacWrite. It also carried a fastloader that made the notoriously slow 1541 drive usable, which mattered more to daily use than any of the graphics did. Commodore bundled it with the cost-reduced C64C, and a Compute!'s Gazette reader survey in 1987 found that almost half of respondents were running it.

I was two years old when that shipped, and by the time I had a machine of my own the company had already left the PC market. There is a more specific reason it was never going to reach me anyway. GEOS was a disk product. It wanted a 1541 and it wanted disks to save to, and the Commodore scene in Turkey ran on cassettes, because a datasette was what you could actually afford here. The Turkish C64 was a games machine loaded off tape with a ten-minute wait, and a windowing office suite that needed a drive and a mouse had no route into that.

The company renamed itself GeoWorks Corporation in 1990 and put GEOS on the PC in 1991. That version is a grave of its own on this site and it failed for reasons of its own, mostly the absence of a developer kit while Windows 3.1 took the market. By the end of 1993 GeoWorks had stopped advertising it and walked away from desktop computing entirely.

~ the case file ~

~ ballmer in the room ~

At the start of the 1990s Bill Gates called Dougherty about folding PC/GEOS features into Windows. PC/GEOS had shipped a start menu roughly two and a half years before Windows had one, and Microsoft wanted both the ideas and the engineers, which meant moving the team to Seattle. The team did not want to move and the lead investor advised against it. Dougherty's account of the meeting has Gates being charming and Steve Ballmer coming in afterward to say that if GeoWorks would not sell or license, Microsoft would have to crush them, because it could not afford a competing PC operating system.

He has never framed that as unfair. His published position is that the PC operating system was a winner-take-all prize worth billions and he would have done the same from Ballmer's chair. There was a parallel conversation with Apple in the same period about a cheap notebook running GEOS under a Macintosh-style interface, which got as far as John Sculley before Apple chose to build PowerBooks running its own system instead. The engineering for it was real: PC/GEOS could be told in a preferences panel to restart itself wearing either a Mac interface or a Windows-like one, and every application on the machine would come back up in the chosen style.

~ the second business ~

After the desktop retreat GeoWorks became an embedded operating system vendor, which is a much less glamorous business and very nearly a viable one. GEOS went into the Tandy Zoomer and into handhelds built by Canon and Sharp. The company floated 1.5 million shares in 1994 and used the money to stay alive, then signed partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Novell. The version most people touched without knowing it was PEN/GEOS 3.0, which is the operating system inside the Nokia 9000 Communicator of 1996, one of the first phones anyone called a smartphone. Nokia moved the later Communicators to Symbian.

In 1996 GeoWorks licensed Ensemble to NewDeal, a Massachusetts company founded by its own former employees, who sold it as an office suite for PCs too slow to run Windows 95. The rest of the story is the usual last chapter for a company with good patents and no product, which is to license the portfolio and then defend it. In 2003 GeoWorks sold its UK operation to Teleca of Sweden and filed for bankruptcy protection at home. The Apple II build of GEOS was released as freeware in August 2003 and the Commodore builds followed in February 2004, which is how an operating system that once shipped behind only MS-DOS and Mac OS ended up as a free download for people with emulators.

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