[artlogic]

I think the most incredible thing about GEOS are the hobbyist programmers who continued to maintain/modify it well after its mainstream lifetime.

I once mentioned to my auto mechanic that I was a programmer, and he invited me into the back room of his garage full of old C64 stuff. He showed me a modified C128 with an IDE interface, running his custom modded version of GEOS (Wheels). He had an accelerator hooked up to the machine and could change the CPU speed from the original C64/128 speed to something that appeared to be 10 times faster. To top off the demo, he showed me the web browser he was working on, bringing up a roughly rendered version of Yahoo's page (it was 1999) on the screen.

It turned out my mechanic was the famous (or infamous) Maurice Randall. It's worth searching for his name to learn about his accomplishments in the C64 hobbyist scene (and his unfortunate unreliability).

[paulhauggis]

An interesting discussion on this very topic):

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39637&sid=b6a11...