Blogartikel auf: Old Vintage Computing Research
Blog von: ClassicHasClass
Friday, June 23, 2023
Last weekend was sad, so let’s do something fun. I’ve mentioned I collect non-x86 laptops and portables (and not just PowerBooks: see my previous entries on the „MIPS ThinkPad“ IBM WorkPad z50, the PA-RISC SAIC Galaxy 1100 and these Sun Ray laptops, among others) because they’re always — and sometimes wildly — different than your average Best Buy special.
Every rule’s got an exception, though:
I will try to pick up x86-based systems with „personality“ (as I see fit). The PCjr, for example, had personality: love it or loathe it, it was definitely different. And the Brother GeoBook series of laptops were certainly different too, late 1990s appliance-style laptops sold at low-end prices intended for basic home tasks. Besides their chunky form factor, flash memory instead of a hard disk and an entire operating system in ROM, that operating system they ran was also different: PC/GEOS, the bigger spiritual sequel to the GEOS operating system for the Apple II and Commodore 64/128. Out of the box and built-in, you got a capable word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, file manager, and basic personal information management, plus pervasive fax support for the included fax/modem. If you wanted, you could even install a basic web browser and E-mail client included on floppy disk.
And by golly, I do mean basic. But it was notable that a browser option existed at all, so we should make it live again. Let’s take a tour around the unit’s built-in applications and explore its guts, then get its PPP connection working again over null modem, hack the browser to understand what an HTTPS URL is and forward it to a Crypto Ancienne proxy, and get the GeoBook back on the Web and accessing current sites. Slowly — but it works! No Betteridge’s law around here! (Teaser: see it load Hacker News and Lobste.rs at the end.)
But first, how on earth did GEOS get into the ROM of a chonktastic plastic laptop?
In 1986 Berkeley Softworks (based, oddly, in Berkeley, because everything in Berkeley is odd, signed, master’s degree from UC Berkeley) released GEOS 1.0 („Graphic Environment Operating System“) for the Commodore 64. It was hardly the first attempt at a GUI for the venerable home computer, but GEOS gave the most credible and comprehensive user experience, not least of which because it included a lot of functionality out of the box: it came standard with full paint and word processing applications, multiple desk accessories, fonts and printer support, all running from floppy disk on a 1MHz 8-bit computer with 64K of memory. Commodore was so impressed by this that they shipped a copy of it with every 64C they sold. Berkeley Softworks (BSW) subsequently made native ports of it to the Commodore 128 and Apple II, and unofficial ports also ran on the Commodore Plus/4 and the Atari 8-bit family.
Around 1988 it was clear the Commodore 64 had peaked and was in decline as a platform, while the MS-DOS PC was growing rapidly in numbers. Even in those days of OS/2 1.0 and Microsoft Windows 2.0, however, there was already a increasing functionality schism between the upper-end IBM AT/80286 and 80386 systems and the lower-end PS/2 and XT-class machines, most of which ran on an 8086, 8088 or clone. These older and slower machines had technical limitations such as pre-286s being limited to real mode, and the functional gulf was predicted to spread further to ATs with the anticipated release of Windows 3.0 and OS/2 2.0. (This proved true: after PC/GEOS‘ initial release, one developer observed in Computerworld in March 1991 that he „can’t imagine anyone running [Windows] 3.0 with a serious application on a 286,“ and praised PC/GEOS as the new alternative, saying its speed „is just blinding compared to Windows.“) Although some low-end specific GUI shells such as Tandy DeskMate were minor successes in their own niche markets, DeskMate’s scope was still primarily around single-tasking applications on home PCs (Tandy 1000 machines in particular), and the included applications were kept bowdlerized enough so as not to compete with DeskMate licensees. This situation presented BSW with a new, similar opportunity on PCs that they’d had with home computers.
The development of BSW’s new project, codenamed OS90, took roughly two years. A complete ground-up rewrite (6502 GEOS was written almost totally in cross-assembled machine language anyway), the only thing it shared with its ancestor was the philosophy that low-end computers could remain highly functional with good software. It was intended to support multiple user interfaces (primarily Motif, but also Windows-alike) and pre-emptively multitask, and do all that on nearly any IBM PC with at least CGA by using a simple scalable UI and keeping the kernel and operating system size in memory small (some sources said just 128K). As with Commodore GEOS, OS90 was also planned to have high-quality productivity applications built-in, and of course foster an environment for third parties to write their own.
Incredibly, the first retail version in October 1990 of what was called GeoWorks Ensemble hit nearly every goal, running on XT-class systems with just 512K of RAM, CGA and MS-DOS 2.0. Recognizing the new operating system’s importance to the company, Berkeley Softworks renamed itself to GeoWorks as well with the release. In addition to serving as a graphical shell for DOS, which GeoWorks ran on top of, adjustable user levels presented a simplified or full user interface as appropriate to novices and advanced users alike. It included a word processor, file manager, draw program and telecommunications modules, all written in assembly language, C with non-standard object extensions, and an interpreted language called IZL.
InfoWorld’s first look in October 1990 was highly positive and said it „has a lot to recommend it,“ complimenting its low system requirements and its better presentation than Tandy DeskMate. COMPUTE in their April 1991 issue was similarly impressed by its system requirements and found the paint program and word processor capable, though missing a few surprising features like spell check and search-and-replace. Their biggest complaint was that there was no spreadsheet or database, which GeoWorks promised to remedy (and did) with a free upgrade. COMPUTE gave it three stars for features, four for documentation, and a full five for ease of use and innovation. Compared to Microsoft Windows 3.0, which came out the same year 1990 for $149.95 [about $350 in 2023 dollars] or $79.95 for 2.0 users, GeoWorks Ensemble was also competitively priced for what it included, at $199.95 [~$460].
I should parenthetically add that GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0 was very hard to run in an emulator (Bochs, DOSBox and QEMU all installed it but hung up trying to run it, even with real MS-DOS and the Bochs BIOS), so this screenshot of the very first release of GeoWorks is from the COMPUTE article. Fortunately, 2.x and up run very well in DOSBox if you change the options in GEOS.INI after installation to continueSetup = false and fs = os2.geo (otherwise you’ll get crashes or unexpected exits with files not found).
GeoWorks did several small updates during this period, including releasing version 1.2 in both Ensemble (consumer) and Professional flavours. It also became a pack-in runtime for a few standalone software packages, most notably America Online in 1991, where it served as the UI for the original DOS client.
Not all the attention GeoWorks attracted was benign. Microsoft, seeing the upstart as a potential threat to eventual Windows dominance, even unsuccessfully tried to buy the company but the offer was rebuffed by CEO Brian Dougherty and management.
In 1993 GeoWorks released Ensemble 2.0, which expanded hardware support, provided an upgraded kernel, and became more of a direct Windows competitor. IBM integrated GEOS into their SchoolView educational GUI product, compatible with Windows and OS/2. Nevertheless, despite total PC/GEOS sales of over 750,000 copies, Microsoft succeeded in strangling the product anyway by swooping up developers, leaving GEOS‘ third-party ecosystem all but non-existent (and GeoWorks‘ somewhat difficult development requirements and lack of a formal SDK surely didn’t help).
But there were other, smaller x86-based devices that could benefit. In 1992, a small startup led by Jeff Hawkins named Palm Computing (yes, that Palm) started digging into the guts of PC/GEOS as the basis for a new handheld computer thanks to those minimal system requirements. Supported by Tandy, GeoWorks and Palm worked simultaneously to add mobility features and enhanced power management to the operating system, using a Casio hardware design with a custom x86-compatible SoC at just 7 MHz. This was the 1993 Tandy „Zoomer“ Z-PDA, also sold by Tandy portables subsidiary GRiD and in an OEM variant directly by Casio.
However, owing to my long affection for the Hewlett-Packard LX series since my days with the HP 95LX, my favourite pen-based GEOS device is the 1995 HP OmniGo 100 (an LX in all but name), which has a keyboard, flippable hinge and PCMCIA slot, and did everything with two AA batteries and a 80186-compatible Vadem VG230 SoC (based on a 16MHz NEC V30HL) in 1MB of RAM and 3MB of flash. Under the hood, there’s even some notable low-level similarities to the GeoBooks. We might talk about these devices in a future article.
GeoWorks found the PDA experience far more rewarding than PCs (even trying to acquire Palm outright, though Hawkins declined their offer), and management believed there was much more potential in this new market than trying to compete with Microsoft on their own turf. Again, this is a branch in the story I might tell later. But the upshot here is that GeoWorks exited the PC market entirely by 1994 after a last-ditch effort to integrate it with IBM PC-DOS 7.0 failed, concentrating entirely on handhelds and mobile in the form of PEN/GEOS. The remnants of PC/GEOS were later licensed to former employees as NewDeal in 1996 who sold it as NewDeal Office, but also to Japanese electronics manufacturer Brother, who intended to use it in their „electronic typewriters“ such as the LW series (and did), but also for a family of new low-end laptops to complement those existing word processor and typewriter lines. And that brings us to the GeoBooks.
Brother developed the GeoBook series at their facility in Bartlett, Tennessee, just outside Memphis. There are in fact three models in the family, all released in 1997, but only two actually bear the GeoBook name. The lowest end was sold with no GeoBook branding at all as the most advanced of their Super PowerNote dedicated word processors, the Super PowerNote Graphic PN-9000GR, while the other two are the black-and-white GeoBook NB-60 and the colour GeoBook NB-80C (both called „Personal Digital Notebooks“ as silkscreened on the lid; the PN just has the Brother logo). All three systems are based on the same CPU and logic board and differ primarily in their display capabilities and port options. This NB-60 was accompanied by its sales receipt and had been bought in 1998 from Office Depot at Brother’s then-MSRP of $599.99, which today in 2023 would be about $1130.
The CPU in the GeoBooks is a 33MHz AMD Élan SC300-33KC SoC (a big leap for the PN-9000GR compared to its elder siblings which were Z80-based). The ÉlanSC300 contains an Am386SXLV core, the same type of AMD 80386 CPU we saw powering the DECtalk Express, as well as a memory controller, ISA and PCMCIA bus controller, serial (16450 UART) and parallel ports, a real-time clock, and either (depending on board configuration) local bus support or a CGA-compatible monochrome LCD display driver. All three have five megabytes of flash ROM (one megabyte of which is for a stripped version of Datalight ROM-DOS 6.22, and the other four containing PC/GEOS 2.0), one megabyte of flash RAM serving as built-in non-volatile storage, and 4MB of RAM (2MB on the PN-9000GR). They also came with a 3.5″ DD/HD floppy drive standard which reads and writes ordinary FAT-formatted floppies.
But as far as other features, the hub of the line was clearly the NB-60 shown here from June 1997, which was also the most widely available unit: the rather rare NB-80C only adds a colour display (and takes away battery life), while the rather uncommon PN-9000GR is defined most strongly by what it lacks compared to its cousins. Instead of the 640×480 passive-matrix 9.4″ greyscale or 10.4″ colour LCDs of the bigger NB-series GeoBooks as shown here, the PN-9000GR has a 640×200 monochrome LCD and no grey at all, driven directly by the CGA support in the AMD Élan SoC. All three systems use the same keyboard, which is decent, and the same „GlidePad“ trackpad, which is hideous. We’re very lucky GEOS works extremely well with just the keyboard.
The slightly yellowed right mouse button and screen standoff pads appear to have become so with age on both my NB-60 and PN-9000GR, as they were originally about the same white shade as the rest of the unit. The latch at the top has two modes, tenacious (in which it won’t unlock) and lazy (in which it won’t lock). I don’t even bother trying to lock it anymore.
Brother’s marketing strongly emphasized cost, saying that for the price of an organizer you could have a full computer. Much as Commodore cornered the early home computer market by eschewing then-traditional computer retail and selling through mass market outlets like Toys’R’Us and Target, Brother sold the GeoBook through retail office supply chains and consumer electronics stores. They also put advertising in unusual locations that new computer buyers would be more likely to view instead of industry rags, like this page from SPIN magazine in November 1997.
Was $599.99 competitive? This ad from August 1997 shows typical pricing for Pentium laptops floating around $1500-$2500 depending on options. Even the closeout here, an IBM ThinkPad 365x, was sold for $1200. While you could find used and refurbished 486 and early Pentium laptops for around $800 to $1000, you were still paying more, and those sorts of refurb systems didn’t always come with the warranty, technical support or pack-in software a home user would want. Compare also with the Philips Velo 1 Windows CE handheld advertised here for $740, or the contemporary PowerBook 1400 and 5300 systems, which started around $2000. It was yesterday’s technology, true, but at less than yesterday’s prices.
Let’s take a tour of the NB-60. The floppy drive is on the right side of the unit, but only the NBs had a PCMCIA slot, which can only be used for linear flash cards (Brother sold 4MB and 10MB cards, though actually any old Compact Flash card in a PCMCIA adapter should be compatible, and I know of cards at least 512MB in size that work just dandy). These show up as a specific drive in the OS but can only be inserted and removed with the power off. No other devices such as network cards, CD-ROM interfaces, etc., are known to work in this slot.
Similarly, only the NBs have the telephone jack for the onboard 33.6/14.4kbps data/fax modem; the modem hardware is absent on the PN, and the PN also lacks VGA output. However, not only do none of the GeoBooks support dual displays, they also don’t support mirroring — when the external VGA is in operation, the internal LCD is turned off — and if you want to use an external display, it must already have been connected when you turn the machine on. Also, since there’s no provision for connecting an external keyboard (though you can connect a serial bus mouse to the DE-9 serial COM port), the external video out is even less useful than you think it is.
The other ports are the external DB-25 parallel and DE-9 serial ports, both provided by the SoC (the internal modem, when present, appears to be connected over a second serial port via the ISA bus). You can connect a faster modem to the serial port, and on the PN this is the only way to connect a modem at all, but this also means you can’t use an external mouse at the same time. Did I mention the GlidePad sucks?
There is also no reset button, which is also annoying, and we’ll talk about possible reasons why when we discuss its BIOS.
You might think that two battery connectors would be actually really nice, and I do admit it would be handy for swapping batteries in and out. But the batteries themselves (BA-4000) are nickel-cadmium and suffer from all the drawbacks of NiCd like memory effect, are only 1400mAh, take fifteen (!) hours to trickle-charge (you can „fast charge“ them in „just“ six hours, but the unit can’t be used while you do that), and only give you about two and a half hours max if you have both battery packs — and just an hour and change if you’ve only got one (which is what it shipped with). Runtime is additionally decreased by activity on the internal modem, PCMCIA or floppy disk. The colour display in the NB-80C reduced it further to just two hours with both packs. On the other hand, the weaker screen and fewer onboard peripherals let the PN-9000GR get up to four hours and change on just one battery pack, and an impressive near nine hours on two!
For as bulky (about 12″x10″, or 296x245mm), thick (2.5″ or 61.5mm) or heavy (5 lbs or 2.26kg, plus batteries) as the NB-60 is — and the NB-80C is about half a pound heavier (2.47kg) — the interior isn’t particularly stuffed full. We can see nearly all of the operative parts simply by removing the keyboard (three clips at the top), showing the ribbon cables for the display, the keyboard, the GlidePad (which is PS/2 internally despite requiring an external serial mouse) and the floppy drive. Most of the rest of the interior is air, the battery bay and the floppy drive, probably to simplify assembly.
The CPU and video chip are the large surface-mount ICs at the bottom of this picture. As noted, the CPU is a 33MHz AMD ÉlanSC300-33KC system-on-a-chip using an Am386SXLV core, roughly equivalent to an Intel 80386SX. On the PN, this is the only chip of the two that is present (the video chip on the right in this view is absent), relying solely on the CGA-compatible monochrome LCD display controller built-in to the Elan SoC. The Elan doesn’t support video-out, so there’s no VGA connector on the PN either.
On the NBs, however, the video chip is a Chips & Technologies F65540, a surprisingly decent choice for the time (and this unit). Even with the base 512K of video RAM the 65540 could display up to 800×600 in 256 colours (24-bit colour at 640×480 with a full 1MB), similar to the contemporary PowerBook 1400 which uses the 65525A. But while the 1400 drives its 800×600 internal display at up to 16-bit colour, the NB’s software only runs it with 16 colours. Not 16 bits: 16 colours.
The other chips visible here are an LGS GM82C765B floppy disk controller and what appears to be a 1MB Macronix ROM (probably containing the BIOS and ROM-DOS).
Next to the C&T video chip is a Holtek HT6542B, a 4-bit microcontroller for the keyboard and glidepad serving functionally as an Intel 8042 clone, alongside a Rockwell RC336ACF/A (R6749-25) modem controller and its small 128K EPROM. The Rockwell controller runs off a 52.416MHz crystal and powers the 33.6/14.4kbps data/fax modem built-in to the NBs. Like most Rockwell modem chipsets of the time it embeds a high-speed Rockwell R65C02-variant core, meaning a 6502 still remained at least a small part of PC/GEOS on the Brotherbooks. All of the modem hardware, including the transformer, controller and EPROM, is entirely absent on the PN.
On the other side next to the CPU is the PCMCIA slot, driven entirely by the PCMCIA controller built-in to the Elan SoC. Again, on the PN there is no slot and no PCMCIA connector. There are spots for four flash ROMs but only two are fitted, both 2MB flash units (one AMD and one Macronix). These likely contain PC/GEOS.
Below the PCMCIA cage are the power and data connectors for the floppy drive. Not visible here is the CMOS battery, pushed way away in the back, requiring you to remove the top case to get to it.
The PN has one chip here that the NBs don’t: the solder pads marked SRAM are populated with a 32K SRAM chip in the PN used as the Elan’s video RAM (the maximum size supported, according to the datasheet). Also not visible in any of these pictures is the 1MB flash RAM used for internal storage, the 512K of video RAM for the C&T chip and the 4MB (PN 2MB) of system RAM, which are present on the underside in all three models.
I don’t have the box but I have everything else that came in the package, including the big brick 35W wallwart power supply (model A41215, same for the PN-9000GR and NB-80C: 12V 1.5A, 7.4mm barrel jack tip negative), both manuals, three floppies containing additional software (the same disks are used for the NB-60 and NB-80C), various ancillary documents like a tip guide and quick-flip how-to, a fold-out accessories catalogue and order form, an advertisement for BrotherWorks ’98 (more on that soon), product registration card and a Brother-specific manual for using EarthLink (Second Edition!), the official pack-in dial-up Internet service provider of GeoBooks, allegedly written by Sky Dayton himself.
Brother did try to have at least some sort of ecosystem around its laptops, though the charges could get stiff in the same way that a basic economy flight is cheap but all the add-ons will cost you. You could order extra batteries, though the claimed three hour runtime was of course only true of the non-GeoBook PN-9000GR, plus an external charger, flash cards, a serial mouse, the official carrying case and a smattering of software. The PN also had an official Brother modem option not shown here.
Two of these software packages struck me as the most interesting: PC synchronization software, letting you sync the scheduler, contacts and task list in the GeoBook with multiple compatible organizer software packages on Windows 3.11, 95 and NT, and a free copy of BrotherWorks 98 on CD-ROM if you wrote in with your unit’s serial number and paid shipping and handling. In fact, BrotherWorks 98 was nothing less than the entire GeoBook PC/GEOS suite in a form that could be installed on a regular PC, although there were minor differences. BW98 runs very nicely in DOSBox too since it’s just a modified Ensemble 2.0 under the hood. We’ll use BW98 as a point of comparison when we start digging more into the operating system.
For most of the screenshots in this article I’m going to switch over to the VGA output because it’s cleaner and colour (even on the NB-60), but here are a few shots of the screen in action booting up.
Oh yeah? You have a splash screen? Well, we have two.
The main menu, which can be lightly themed with a custom title, different background colours (here, shades of grey) and patterns. Attempting to ape the interface of its PowerNote ancestors, this screen serves as the launcher and is optimized strictly for single-tasking — though GEOS‘ excellent support for keyboard shortcuts makes using the menu a breeze. Everything on-screen here has an underlined hot key. In applications, most of the options and buttons do as well, and for those things that don’t, nearly every gadget is accessible with the arrow keys, TAB and ENTER (and pulldown menus with the MENU key, which is what Brother renamed ALT).
Here’s the main menu for comparison on my PN-9000GR. The PN’s display is definitely sharper and smoother, though the mouse pointer is still very hard to see in motion, and of course it’s smaller, bezelicious and not backlit.
The available applications on both systems, going left to right and top to bottom, are word processing, a spreadsheet, „Internet“ (goes to a secondary screen for settings or launching the browser or E-mail client), file manager, address book, planner, drawing (graphics), scrapbook (a pastebox, similar to the classic Mac application of the same name), book reader (its own bespoke hypertext format), a to-do list, the calculator, and the preferences screen (also with its own subapplets). A few of these can be launched either standalone or as „desk accessories,“ and at least one built-in application isn’t visible here. We’ll look at each.
The optional browser, E-mail client, text editor, terminal program, Solitaire and Turnabout/Reversi were on floppy disks included with the computer, but only the browser and E-mail client could officially be installed to the on-board flash. It seems like space was the reason, as I found out personally when I exceeded the internal flash capacity trying to manually copy Solitaire. Alternatively you could put the other apps on the PCMCIA card, but only with the NB systems.
It is possible to change the launcher to something else and even re-enable multitasking by copying portions of a PC/GEOS install to the GeoBook, though at that point you might as well just get some other 386 laptop and run PC/GEOS for real.
The word processor, probably where most users spent most of their time, and the GeoBook’s strongest built-in app because of the decent keyboard. Notice that the application title bar appears at the bottom of the screen with the close gadget at the left side, along with indicators for caps lock, num lock and insert, plus symbol and help buttons. (On the PN, which has no greyscale, the close gadget is a more typical „X“ instead.) Brother called the GeoBook UI „Yago,“ basically a modification of the standard GeoWorks Motif UI but again optimized for single tasking. Although GeoWorks supported other UIs, the ability to select an alternative interface was removed from the GeoBook and no other user interface was provided.
Anyway, let’s start over with the VGA connected this time.
Main screen turn on! Notice that the background is actually cyan.
Splash screen.
And, once again, the main menu — in colour. Obnoxiously the UI elements are in a dark dingy grey which has poor contrast against the black lettering. This is not a quirk of my VGA capture box; my regular flat panel monitor shows it too. Strangely, it’s not a problem on the NB’s internal display.
There’s a „secret“ option in the menu, though it’s not really all that secret since Brother put the key combination all over the case stickers that the prior owner removed (but my PN still has its set): if you press CTRL-D, you’ll start a demo.
The demo is a standard GEOS application, just a full-screen one. (Despite calling itself GEOS 3.0, it seems to have only minor changes from GEOS 2.0, and GeoBook PC/GEOS has nothing to do with the later NewDeal GEOS 3.0 kernel.) It cycles through various ad screens of which I’ve only shown the first two main ones; the PN has its own set peculiar to its own graphical limitations. If you press F3 to exit, just like any other application, the demo will terminate and return you to the main menu. So we do.
Starting the word processor. Let’s take a little longer tour of the UI.
Besides using templates for new documents, you could also import from ASCII text, Microsoft Word 3.0-5.5, WordPerfect 5.0/5.1 (DOS or Windows), or WordStar through 7.0, and export to those formats. The word processor even supported advanced features like mail merge from a spreadsheet (on the clipboard) or the address book, a bibliography and table of contents, footnotes, clip art, graphics and style sheets. Also, anything you could print, you could fax. This was more than a basic word processor and certainly played to the GeoBook’s strengths.
Still, for a quick spin, we’ll just emit the great American novel. With two notable exceptions no built-in app supports multiple document windows, so if you tried to open or start a new document after starting on this one, you’d have to close this first document beforehand. And who can give prose up to the winds of oblivion that’s as great as this?
Pull-down menus can be accessed with ALT (again, which the keyboard labels „MENU“). Like Motif, pull down menus can be pinned.
And when they are pinned, they remain so until closed (the close gadget is the weird triangle thing).
The SYM button at the lower right pops open a character palette. It is always available on text fields that allow it.
A limited number of applications could multitask as quasi-desk accessories via the function keys, including some that aren’t even on the main menu. F9 brings up a tiny clock in the upper right, and F9 dismisses it again. (This works on the main menu, too.)
F10 brings up the calculator, the same one you’d get from the main menu, and also dismisses it. I’ll have more to say about the calculator below. However, you can run multiple desk accessories at once, so we’ll just keep on stacking those windows.
F11 brings up a world clock, also not offered from the main menu.
And finally F12 brings up the to-do list.
These „desk accessories“ exist in a weird application limbo. Like regular applications, their windows are not resizeable, but they are clearly treated differently in that they always overdraw the host application even if the host is foregrounded. Within their own hierarchy they can also overlap and change their Z-order amongst themselves. Additionally, if you close the host application, then any running desk accessories keep running as if you had launched them separately; you don’t return to the main menu until each one exits also. Only one of each desk accessory can run at a time.
Dialogue box example as we close out.
Next, the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet is also pretty good, supporting a decent range of formulae, charts and graphics, and allowing basic data manipulation like sorting as if it were a table. It could also print and fax, though its compatibility formats were limited to Lotus 1-2-3, dBase IV and CSV (no Excel, no Wingz).
The address book, which really should have been a sidecar desk accessory instead of a full app, and wastes a lot of screen real estate.
The planner, which is also basic, but does demonstrate PC/GEOS doesn’t seem to have a Y2K problem.
The drawing app, which is actually a vector rather than a paint (raster) app, although it had limited bitmap editing capabilities. With the GlidePad it is primarily an exercise in cussing but works halfway decently with an external mouse within the limits of its computational capacity. The 16 colour limitation precluded anything photorealistic but it was possible to make very high resolution images up to 2400dpi. Images could be printed or faxed, imported from BMP, GIF, PCX or TIF, and exported to BMP (Windows 2.x, 3.x or OS/2).
Since none of the larger apps were allowed to multitask, a way of passing information from app to app was by pasting content into the multi-page scrapbook, though the clipboard necessarily persisted between apps or otherwise this scheme wouldn’t have been possible. The scrapbook could also directly import from most of the formats above, though oddly Lotus 1-2-3 and CSV were only imported as text and dBase IV wasn’t supported at all. You could load and save multiple scrapbooks as a sort of personal clip library.
The Book Reader was particularly interesting. Two books were provided on floppy disk, one for NANP area codes and one for U.S. ZIP codes. Both of these are horrifically out of date by now, but the book format (which seems to have been derived from the help format) worked well.
Imagemaps were even supported.
As a hypertext interface it seemed very good, and you could cut and paste data for other applications. But there was no way provided to create any books of your own. A depth to plumb some other time.
The to-do list and calculator, here shown as standalones in the way the menu would launch them. However, their windows aren’t resizeable here either, and they don’t make any attempt to soak up the remaining screen space. They can multitask here with the other desk accessories, but you can’t launch more than one instance of, say, the calculator with F10: instead, it simply closes the currently running instance.
The preferences app opens up to a page of sub-applets, namely battery charge plus settings for date and time, fax, „Lights Out“ (screensaver), look & feel, modem (built-in or external), mouse (built-in or external), printer driver and sound (basically beep or no beep). We won’t do all of them here, just the low/highlights.
You call that fast charging? At least with the fifteen-hour trickle charge you can use the machine and there’s less risk of memory effect. Additionally, the manual warns that the extra heat generated in „special charge“ mode could even temporarily make the LCD blurry if you did it with the lid closed.
Fax was still king, or at least a relatively well-regarded viceroy, in 1997, and as mentioned every app that could print could fax. The manual also took pains to remind you that, under the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, it was unlawful to use a computer or other electronic device such as a fax machine to send unsolicited faxes, or even solicited ones without clearly identifying the sender, their phone number, and the date and time it was sent (either in the margin of each page or the cover sheet) — though see the subsequent Junk Fax Protection Prevention Act of 2005 for a way around this when an alleged „existing business relationship“ was present. It was also unlawful under the TCPA to use a 1-900 number or other charges-more-than-long-distance number as that phone number. So fill it out right or feel the fury of the United States government probably not!
The „Lights Out“ preference pane lets you select a screensaver, though if you’re running on battery power, Lights Out will simply (wisely) suspend the machine.
The Look & Feel pane is limited only to minor cosmetic and behavioural changes (and even those cosmetic changes are only relevant for the main menu screen), whereas regular GeoWorks Ensemble was capable of much more.
The Modem pane let you select between the internal modem (NBs only) or an external modem, which is the only option for the PN. We’ve selected „external“ for a null modem connection to our simulated PPP provider.
Clicking Speed and Format Options brings up this dialogue where the communication parametres can be set. Note that the maximum bitrate for the external serial port is 38400bps, which may be due to the fact there’s no FIFO buffer in the 16450-compatible UART provided by the ÉlanSC300 that drives it. Since that’s the most we can do, that’s what we’ll be running our null-modem PPP connection at.
Finally, our last stop on this first leg of the tour is the file manager. The file manager has three noteworthy attributes.
The first is that it’s absolutely capable of acting as the shell in place of the main menu. If you open a document from the file manager, then when that document’s application exits, it will return to the file manager instead of the main menu.
The second is that it’s one of the two apps with multiple document windows (you can select the display mode at the bottom left, but even in the „single window“ mode there are still multiple windows you switch between with the Window menu). The windows are also resizeable, unlike the calculator and to-do list apps, for example.
The third is that it’s a damned liar. Only drives A: (floppy), E: (PCMCIA storage) and F: (onboard flash) are displayed and no other drives are accessible. That goes not only for the File Manager but also any file requester in any application.
But soft(ware)! — what light in yonder window breaks? It is the shell, COMMAND dot COM! (The other files are also system-provided, except for Communication and Turnabout [Reversi] which I installed from the included floppies.)
Et voilà, we have DOS! Specifically Datalight ROM-DOS, version 6.22.
But not much DOS. Few commands seem implemented.
In fact, most external DOS commands aren’t even present (though a full install of ROM-DOS would have them). But let’s look at what is present: despite the lies told to us in the File Manager, there are in fact C: (called ROM-DISK) and D: (called RAM-DISK) drives in addition to A:, E: and F:, which we already knew about.
The RAM disk is far faster than the flash drive on F:, which is rather slow even by flash drive standards of the day. It would be ideal for temporary files, not only to access them quickly, but also for not burning useless write cycles on the internal flash — and as it happens, that appears to be exactly all the system uses it for. I imagine Brother hid the RAM disk from the interface so people wouldn’t accidentally put anything there they meant to keep.
If we look at the very short C:\CONFIG.SYS, it has a LASTDRIVE of G:, so there can be no H: or onward, and in fact there’s no G: either.
The ROM disk on C: is purely „just enough DOS“ (compare with „just enough TOS“) to start the machine and serve as the underpinnings of PC/GEOS.
And the C: drive is really ROM, not flash-as-ROM. You can’t write to it. No boot sector viruses on this machine, by golly.
You may have noticed there was very little in C:\CONFIG.SYS, not even a memory manager, even though Datalight ROM-DOS does support EMM386. As a result there are no UMBs, so much of the first megabyte of the 4MB RAM is wasted, and the rest is XMS (and part of it backs the RAM disk in D:).
The COM port tester finds our serial bus mouse on COM1:, which is the external port, and the internal modem is on COM2:. The UARTs are different because the ElanSC300’s onboard 16450 services the external port, but the internal modem is handled by a separate 16550 over the internal ISA bus. The serial bus mouse will work with free drivers like CuteMouse.
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