@morgan @psf
This. People used to be proud of the software they created! And for good reasons too.

I have fond memories of C64 GEOS by Berkeley Softworks which later became GeoWorks. There was an interview in I think Compute's Gazette on their work on GEOS, how their engineers would take a routine and try to shave off clock cycles and bytes of memory use. And do it several times per each routine. It was such an amazing environment on the ridiculously constrained hardware. And now we have emulators for that stuff running inside the browser, consuming several gigabytes of memory.

One of the fondest memories of it is a when I returned a larger history homework project written with GeoWrite (I think in 1990), and the teacher asked me to stay after class for a chat. I was dreading some disciplining, although wasn't sure for what. Instead he was genuinely amazed at the print quality and just wanted to know what equipment I had used to do it. He was something between flabbergasted and disbelief when I told him it was entirely done on a Commodore 64. He said his expensive new PC couldn't produce anything like it.

What I didn't tell him was that GeoWrite didn't have scandinavian letters, so I had to add the dots over ä and ö manually 😄

#c64 #geos