PC/GEOS v1.0 ran on an original IBM PC with 640K. The minimum for v1.2 was 1MB of RAM.
In terms of responsiveness, it was an interesting compare and contrast from the Sun workstations vs. the PCs running GEOS. Less mouse jitter is one memory (especially in comparison to those old Ultrix machines).
Yeah, PC/GEOS was built from the ground up to give that fully scalable "WYSIWYG" "Display Postscript" experience but the PC displays at the time weren't very good.
I remember learning about self-modifying assembly in the low level drawing code from JimDF.
Lol. Migration of PC/GEOS to protected-mode 32-bit x86 was not some magical rubicon that wasn't foreseen.
Geoworks was doing well until its sales deals got utterly hosed by the Microsoft monopoly power play. That started a cascade of direct and indirect problems from both a technology and business perspective.
Yeah, it took way too long to prioritize and deliver a non-assembly development chain and opening that up to the public at large.
We cross-developed from Sun workstations to x86 PCs and quality of x86 native tooling wasn't nearly as good. But eventually building on x86 was actually quite a bit faster.
Yeah, they don't seem to have any serious Emacs person in their team. So, like so many people who try and build editors in the last few decades, they seem to miss some fundamental things (while focusing on other worthy things like the core rope+crdt enabling fast local & collaborative editing).
They talk about things like having a plug-in type system in the future based on e.g. WASM but, as you're pointing out, their fundamental perspective is built around the simplistic notion of a control panel with fixed functionality that's primarily accessed via a bizarre set of keymaps. On this front, might as well stick with JetBrains.
A lot of us have been following along with Zed hoping that the clarity and action on the open sourcing front would be done or at least in the process of happening before the public beta but from what was shared in the podcast, it doesn't sound like any progress has been actually made on this front.
Especially, since Zed does have a very clear distinction/dividing line of "completely functional local editor" == permissive open source vs. "all of the real-time & async collaboration features" == proprietary that is easy to explain.
Frankly, I would happily pay for great, fully supported, high-quality real-time collaboration for my teams.
Anyway, as you can see, not having any useful progress on this front instantly shuts down lots of people and there's many of us who won't even consider doing more than checking it out until this is done.
You'll be called much much worse than that. IME, you'll be lumped into the "other side" as defined by each of the bad faith participants. And if you point out their bad faith intent and rhetorical games, the level of ad hominem attacks increases exponentially.
I've worn out multiple of them over many many years of using the Kinesis Advantage (and then Advantage 2) (before I went down the splergo rabbit hole).
One thing to note is that people with large hands and/or long finger lengths can find the fixed size hand wells too cramped.
Note that for people who are used to and prefer the short travel of laptop keyboards, they should check out mechanical keyboards with choc switches rather than the much longer travel MX switches.
Good entry point for people coming from the "traditional" keyboard world -- particularly those who don't expect to invest a lot of time in things like learning radically different layouts, heavy use & customization of layers, etc.