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.
These are, like NVC, tools to help when people are generally intending to work together. I.e., it presumes non-toxic participation.
Alas, in, for example, big company "politics" manipulating the system to further oneself typically subverts such processes and creates broken/toxic cultures.
One of things that's missing in this is that the parties involved actually intend to work together. As is clear from the various threads of discussion to this post, people react based on their underlying (dis)trust of the intent of the other party. That's why this is experienced by many folks emotionally as "passive-aggressive" manipulation.