Geoworks ensemble 2.0 download

All other values can be left as the defaults. NOTE: The install program will allow you to continue if you are sure that there is enough space. You might get a "SYS Error To change this extended attribute: A. Then install from the copies. To run Reset.

Then restart Ensemble normally. EXE is not set high enough for Ensemble. If the line is correct and you still get the error message, try increasing the number in increments of until the error message stops. Should the file ever become damaged, you can copy the file from the original install installation files. Primary reasons for getting system errors. A one-in-a-million fluke B. SYS file C. Corrupt files or bad sectors on your hard drive D. Damaged document files E. A conflict with other software F.

Low on hard disk space G. Low on memory RAM H. A virus I. Go through the following steps, in order, to locate and fix the source of the error. Wait a few seconds, then turn it on again.

Go back into Ensemble. Do exactly what you were doing when the error message appeared. If you don't get another error message, it was probably a one-time fluke. If you only get the error in one specific document, skip to section D, Damaged Documents. Then look under the appropriate section below. Now try to reproduce the steps that gave you the error. Over time, it's not unusual for hard disks to develop small surface defects that result in bad sectors.

The only ways to check for and fix bad sectors are to use a commercial hard disk utility program, such as Norton Disk Doctor or PC Tools DiskFix or the old method: backup the hard drive, reformat it, and restore your files from the backup.

You could also try installing the software into a new, different directory on the hard drive. Make sure you use the CD command to change to this directory before typing Ensemble to start Ensemble otherwise you may run the original copy. If you don't experience problems, your original copy of Ensemble is either damaged or is written on bad sectors of your hard drive. If you find errors: Once you've fixed the hard disk problems, you should re-install Ensemble. Use your original installation disks, and choose the New Install option.

Re-installing this way won't delete or copy over your personal documents. Use your backup copy to replace the file. If you don't have a backup copy, you'll have to re-create the document from scratch. You should backup any files that you don't want to re-create. It is always a good idea to save and backup important work. If you still get the error, try the more thorough test outlined below. If you no longer get the error, you have a software conflict.

You can either go into Preferences, Computer and change the Extra Memory option to None, or perform the more thorough test below. More thorough test: Boot from a clean floppy disk. If you run any disk compression utilities like Stacker or SuperStor, you'll need to include any statements from your configuration files that make those programs run. BAT on the bootable diskette. Add one line, save the file, reboot, and run Ensemble. Eventually you'll find the line that's causing the problem. You can free up some space by backing up rarely used programs or documents to disk and deleting them from the hard drive.

If you are loading a lot of device drivers and memory-resident programs before you load the software, you might be running out of memory. This number should be at least , If it's lower, you need to disable some of the programs that are loading into your conventional memory.

SYS file. You'll need to reboot for the changes to take effect. Use any reputable virus-checking software. Odd there is no mention of it. Am I making this up? You're thinking of Geoworks Ensemble. It did everything windows 3. Crash every seconds 2. Run more than the 30 or so apps that came with the distro. Still, a good, solid windowing system for low-end hardware. GEOS is still around. Believe it or not, the GEOS codebase is still alive and kicking.

I haven't gotten around to trying it personally, but it's supposedly updated for modern hardware and is capable of browsing the web. Breadbox, the company that apparently owns the code now is marketing it as a low-cost alternative to Windows for schools that could be run on older hardware.

Interesting in the least. Re:GEOS is still around. Score: 3 , Informative. Sorry, I messed up the link in that post. Same company, different codebase Berkley Softworks developed CGeos, which was also ported to the Apple and such, and then all through the 80s worked on their next accomplishment: Geos for the PC. Near laser quality from a mere pin and my old ' I miss it now. Re:geoworks ensemble kicked ass Score: 5 , Interesting. This looks like it could have actually gone pretty far had it had a chance.

As a cheap alternative to an apple it looks like it had some good functionality. Does anyone know what the reliability of this OS was like.

Its a shame that this wasnt given the support that it deserved. WHo knows what it could have been capable of. I suppose most people rejhected it as the C64 was mainly for gaming, at least when i was a kid it was. If i had known it was around, and i had more interest in OS', this probably would have ended up in my living room. Its been a while, but its still good to see what some of the pioneers were capable of. Re:interesting stuff Score: 5 , Informative.

You're thinking of two different products. Awesome little machine, with an even more awesome GUI that ran off of floppies. Back in my day we didn't have hard drives, and we liked it! They had a trash can concept long before Apple even thought of it. It was a contemporary of Windows 3. Of course, the company had zero marketing skill while Microsoft, well, we know their marketing strategy.

So Windows won and GEOS, which I still consider to be one of the best idiot-friendly interfaces ever created, eventually petered out. It's last gasp was on the Casio Z Zoomer handhelds. They were released right after the original Apple Newton the Newton beat them by about 3 months , and wasa joint coventure between Casio hardware , GeoWorks OS , and a little startup company run by Jeff Hawkins and Dona Dubinsky called "Palm Computing".

While the Z was a market flop, along with the original Newton, it was from the mistakes there that Hawkins and company learned how to make a handheld the right way, and so was born the Palm Pilot. There was also an attempt at a GEOS 3. It ran all of the same apps as the desktop GeoWorks and used the exact same data file format, and used a very tablet PC-esque form factor and design as far back as Unfortunately, Sharp for unknown reasons killed the project at the last minute, and it was never produced outside of beta units within the company itself.

Once again, GEOS beat Microsoft to the punch, by nearly a decade this time, but it just didn't work out for whatever reason. Except for really hard core hackers with old C64s, this is not really major news. Still, it's a nice trip down memory lane. Re:interesting stuff Score: 3 , Interesting. There was also the Nokia smartphone released in 96 or so. It was pretty much a phone with a in the same case. Supposedly it sold really well to business people - enough to prompt a second version of it, the Eventually Nokia created Symbian.

I don't really know what prompted Nokia to start Symbian, considering they already had a fairly successfu. Re:interesting stuff Score: 3 , Informative. GEOS came out in I belive it was first mocked up in , check folklore.

Once upon a time you could load that onto a and it would make a Pentium-based Windows machine look like it was standing still. I'm looking for Geoworks to throw onto some 's I want to bring back to life -- the last version I remember had a web-browser and everything! Score: 2. I don't know anywhere that it can be downloaded, but GeoWorks came with a couple of refurbished s my school had around 6th grade This is part of the reason I rescued them when the school decided to get rid of them a year ago.

It's really a great little system, it even has an AOL client of all things. Not that anyone is still go. AOL Score: 5 , Interesting. I'm loathe to admit this now, but I was one of the very first subscribers I think the first -- not sure about the whole Quantum service and prehistory to AOL in my town. Or rather, it came with a GeoWorks runtime, which wasn't good for anyone else. I remember thinking it was really cool.

I was also on the beta team for AOL for Windows 1. Damn I'm lame. I used it for quite a while. I even ran it on an , even though the specs said I couldn't. Even as late as I was using it in a shop I worked at on some old 's, for basic office productivity stuff. For a while it was going head to head with Windows, and doing well. Even preinstalled on some systems. What ultimately killed it was the lack of a good SDK.

No one developed for it, so the only apps available were pretty much what cam. Re:lemme see if i remember What was that ,8,1 all about anyways? I remember you had to type it to load certain programs but I never knew the reason. You're correct on the ",8" part.

As for the ",1", well, it went like this. The first two bytes of every standard file that was designed to be loaded using kernel routines whether it be from the BASIC LOAD command, or through the actual kernel routines were the load address. Anyway, to make a long story short, that ",1" told the load routines to load the file into the memory space pointed to by those first two bytes. Actually, the autoloading was usually done by machine language programs.

As part of that program you would actually save a copy of the vectors, and set the load address of your executable to be that of the vectors. When your program loaded, you overwrote the vectors, and one of them controlled where program execution went after a load. It's been a long time since I've done that, so the exact details in my mind are hazy.

But that's how some of the simple autoloaders were done. I remember using a joystick to navigate the UI, since mice were a bit of a rarity. Plus, GeoWrite actually had fonts to choose from, and they looked great on the trusty old dot-matrix or 'impact printer', if you will Re:ah, the oldskool memories Score: 4 , Funny. Not only did GEOS have fonts, it was possible to overload the system memory and crash the computer, forcing a reboot if you tried to load too many of them at once.

Man, those were the days. Heehee I remember that! Then we got the boxy Commodore mouse! Got me through school assignments fine. I wonder if you could put together an indestructable 'laptop', with a screen, a keyboard, and about a thimblefull of 'hardware' to run it on.

Tweak it to support file transfer via USB. Kind of like the Newton-based eMac, or Alphasmart's Dana. It's a perfectly functional OS and the footprint doesn't get lower than that. Emulator Score: 5 , Interesting. Can someone post instructions on how to get this set up with an emulator like CCS64? We don't want to have to wade through that ten page explanation on how to use a real C64, copying around floppies, etc. Re:Emulator Score: 5 , Informative. I haven't done this yet, but I would imagine that you could create.

D64 files disk images , and use them. However, it's hard to say whether or not this would work with an emulator or not. Re:Emulator Score: 4 , Interesting. Yes, they make that claim. However, I have tried some programs in the past that did not work, because they used fastloaders. The Commodore drives have five wires on the serial port I think. Of those, I think only two of them could send data. This of course, was extremely slow, so somebody came up with a solution: send data over both lines, but make sure that the code on both sides was running at almost exactly the same speed.

So, the drive would break down the byte into bits, and send two bits at a time when using the fastloader. The C64 would receive the two bits and reassemble them into the byte. But, since the CLK line was being used for data, the timing had to be precise, otherwise you'd miss bits. Also, because sprites would mess up the CPU cycles, they had to be disabled, as did any funky IRQs which normally there weren't any running , or you'd have problems with the data.

Most fastloaders just blanked the screen, which took care of this. Apple II Version was released 6 months ago. The Apple II version was released 6 months ago. Brings back memories Score: 2. It ran very well considering the hardware it was running on. You see color screenshots on the site, but it really had to do all that with 2 color tiles. It had a wysiwyg document editor. It was even able to load normal programs and then restore itself when the program exited. The cost GEOS v1.

The paintbrush in particular gave me hours of entertainment, and there were some nifty fonts as well. Annoying, however was the fact that the boot disk could not be copied by any conventional means, thanks to error track copy protection. Looks like And after only 80 replies, too. That's what you get when you actually host a website on a C64 running Contiki Re:Looks like Score: 4 , Insightful.

They were still typewriters, but they did slightly more interesting things than write type. And much like netbooks, reviewers hated them. When I wrote the original piece, it ended kind of sadly, as it had been written at a time when GeoWorks, as a concept, was at its proverbial fork in the road after passing through a whole series of hands.

The good news is, GEOS has found its direction once again. But perhaps its longest legacy was in the hands of a firm named Breadbox, which had essentially treated GeoWorks as a volunteer upkeep project, with the eventual goal of turning the GEOS into an educational software platform that worked in tandem with Android. But as I noted at the end of my original story from the platform faced a devastating setback when one of its maintainers, Frank S.

Fischer, died unexpectedly. Fellow maintainer John F. Which is great news! GEOS was many things over the years, but never open source. Managed by a firm named blueway. Softworks, the application took a complicated route to open source, TechRepublic reporter James Sanders noted in March , including agreements with the former rights-holders.

Speaking to the publication, blueway. The goal, he adds, is to give it state-of-the-art features and improve its level of support. Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! Live and breathe all the technical details in this?

Wanna find a new job that puts them to the test? Try out this quiz from Triplebyte to see where your tech expertise lies. It might be the first step in finding your dream gig in the tech industry. Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, and an active internet snarker.

Between his many internet side projects, he finds time to hang out with his wife Cat, who's funnier than he is. Find me on: Twitter Like this? Well, you should read more of our stuff. Get more issues in your inbox. What is Tedium? Support us on Patreon Share your ideas! Disclosure: From time to time, we may use affiliate links in our content—but only when it makes sense.