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From: dtaylor@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Douglas A Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: EMSEMBLE / GEOS
Message-ID: <1991Jun6.132135.27220@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 6 Jun 91 13:21:35 GMT
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In article <00949AEE.213FCB60@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU> gilmour@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU writes:
%Hey, this is my first post on this wonderful international BBS!
%What I was wondering was, what's the general response to PC GEOS?
%It looks very similar to WINDOWS - is it any better any worse?  I
%do like the idea of the scalable fonts.   And finally, is this the
%place that I should be posting such a post?

I've been using GEOS for a couple of months now, and I've been very
impressed.  I have a '286 machine with 640k, and the Windows demo that
Microsoft asked me to look at wouldn't even run on it.  I can not only run
GEOS on my machine, I can multitask (yes, *really* multitask) GEOS 
applications, edit files of any size, and print Postscript-quality text & 
graphics on my Deskjet Plus *while* I'm playing Solitaire (GEOS supports
multiple threads, something that Windows doesn't).  GEOS have a file manager
that beats Win3's hands down, an electronic Rolodex that doesn't look like
somebody just pasted a piece of cardboard on the screen, and an imaging model 
that lets you see a screen *exactly* the way it's going to be printed.
(Window text onscreen is sometimes jagged if you don't buy Adobe Type Manager).

I frequently use GEOS to file my recipes.  While I'm dowloading a file of
recipes I've collected from Internet in one window, I'm editing another recipe
file with GeoWrite in another window, cutting text from that file and pasting
it into Geodex for filing in a third window.  Do I think GEOS is a terrific
program?  Of course I do.  What other program would let me do all that on a
'286, 640k machine?

Now for the down side.  Windows has two things that GEOS lacks.  First, you
can't multitask DOS applications with GEOS, even on a '386.  You can't even
task-switch between GEOS and DOS or DOS and DOS (I understand that GEOS 2.0
will support task switching and cut/pasting between DOS/GEOS applications.
It's supposed to be released this fall, I think.)

Second, GEOS lacks Windows' marketing juggernaut.  Everybody seems to want to
write programs for Windows these days.  The result, of course, is that some
good stuff (and probably a lot more terrible stuff :-) is being written for
that environment.  By contrast, there are currently no third-party products
out for GEOS, although the makers of VP Planner are soon to be coming out
with a GEOS-based spreadsheet.

So, if you have a '286 or less, I'd recommend that you buy GEOS if you want
to be able to multitask applications, print laser-quality text & graphics on
even a 9-pin printer, and play a better version of Klondike that Win3's.  If
you have a 100 MHz'386, 12 billion megs of memory, and an HP Laserjet III -- 
well, GEOS is still the better environment, but I guess I'll let you run
Windows 3.0, too.



-- 
   Doug Taylor                         |   Nothing real can be threatened.
   The Ohio State University           |   Nothing unreal exists.
   doug_taylor@osu.edu                 |            - A Course in Miracles