Berkeley, California-based Geoworks Inc, the third leg of the Tandy Corp-Casio Computer Co Ltd triumvirate teaming to develop a new generation of Personal Information Processors (CI No 1,931) has been describing what it will be bringing to the party – its GEOS Graphic Environment Operating System. Geos is a graphical object oriented operating environment incorporating pre-emptive multithreaded multi-tasking, a PostScript-like single imaging model for WYSIWYG display and printing, and virtual memory management. It supports both scalable and flexible user interface technologies so that an application can have selectable levels of complexity (beginner to advanced) as well as supporting multiple types of input devices – keyboard, mouse, touch screen, pen, other devices as yet undreamed of. Minimum system requirements for GEOS are an 8088 processor, 512Kb of memory, and 1Mb of fixed storage. Among those developing GEOS-based applications is Palm Computing Inc, founded by Jeff Hawkins, formerly vice-president of research at GRiD Systems Corp. Palm will provide applications and its PalmPrint handwriting recognition software for the Personal Information Processors. GeoWorks claims over 500,000 customers of its GEOS-based GeoWorks Ensemble and GeoWorks Pro application suite. GeoWorks Pro is now available in the American, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages.
