Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

It's consuming me because at long last I'm *able* to. There's docs, disassemblies, & reimplementations in easy reach now.

In 1989, I got a well-used copy of the Official GEOS Programmer's Reference Guide (which I call OGPRG) & geoProgrammer. Due to critical errors in OGPRG & sample source code files, I've been wanting a single reference as complete & correct as the C64PRG ever since, knowing the only way I'll get one is if I write it myself. I've wanted to for 30 whole years. Now it's consuming me, & when I'm done I'll probably know the OS inside out.

Bil Herd, the 128's designer, gave a talk in '16 about what it was like inside Commodore during the second of its "tragedy in three acts." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zpv6u5vCJ4

🎼 Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you! 🎶

No, really, run faster! There are 64 commodores after you! Maybe 264 or 364! Oh no, that's Commodore Juan Twennyate! ⛵ ⛵ ⛵

... Only two were.

There are also times when I really like the CLI and the power of shellscripts. Last night, I spent about 5 hours hand-drawing just a few technical pictures in gimp 6x each because I didn't like how they turned out. Today, in about 5 hours, I wrote and debugged scripts using ImageMagick and a short text file to draw 34 pictures for me, and to write a whole HTML table of data (including ASCII art) to go with the pictures besides.

Specifically, "while" loops on the receiving end of a pipe. Variables are local because the loop is executed in a subshell. Oops.

There are times when I really question my choice to do things in shellscript. Did you know that in BSD /bin/sh and in Bash, variables inside "for" loops are global like normal, but variables inside "while" loops are automatically local to the loop? I didn't, and I wasted about an hour fruitlessly debugging everything because of it.

Am I the only one who pronounces the 8-bit OS "GEOS" as "gee-ohs"? I've heard like four other pronunciations now.

This ✨ sparkly shellscript princess ✨ spent her weekend writing a shellscript to convert numbers from one base to an intermediate representation to another base. The result is the most uselessly useful shellscript I've written in a *very* long time, a script to convert a conventional date into a Rickdate string: https://thornton2.com/rickdate.html

Pictured: my sense of accomplishment.

While adventuring in the lands digital, refrain from stabbing thy trustworthy companion, ye olde Amiga 500.

It took 20 years for me to take this picture. IDK if the larger one works, but the smaller one still works.

Important related trivia if you use real or emulated Commodore 8-bits: Never, ever validate a disk containing GEOS files outside of GEOS. If you do, you'll corrupt all those files.

I may have found one, & I'm almost kicking myself. cc65 has a symbol table lifted from the Hitchhiker's Guide to GEOS, checked only for fidelity not correctness. But it also uses a few include files for cross-compiling Apple II GEOS programs, which means conflicting addresses *had* to be resolved: https://github.com/cc65/cc65/tree/master/libsrc/geos-apple

Back in the day, GEOS was so popular that (by one account at least) nearly half of all C64 owners used it. GEOS 128 didn't quite reach the same status but it was still a bit respectable. The Plus/4 & Apple II versions, however, never made it out of obscurity.