, founder of Berkeley Softworks, pictured in 1987 Berkeley Softworks, Inc., was founded in
Berkeley, California, by
Brian P. Dougherty in 1983 as The Softworks. Before starting his company, Dougherty—a graduate of
UC Berkeley—had previously co-founded
Imagic, a video game developer and publisher based in
Los Gatos, California, in 1981. Imagic was founded by ex-employees of
Mattel Electronics (of which Dougherty was one) and
Atari, Inc. Founded with $2 million of venture capital, Imagic was initially successful but collapsed in the wake of the
1983 video game market crash. By comparison, Berkeley Softworks was founded with no capital beyond the $100,000 in net worth after having exited Imagic. He incorporated The Softworks two blocks away from his alma mater. In 1984, the company changed its name to Berkeley Softworks and began releasing its first products, mostly games for
home computers
Apple II, the
Commodore 64, and the
IBM Personal Computer, as well as video game consoles such as the
ColecoVision and the
Sega Master System. Many of the company's employees were recent students of UC Berkeley who took semesters off to earn money in between their studies. Dougherty described employee turnover rate in 1988 as low, with no offers to join the company's technical staff turned down and no employee leaving of their own volition. In 1985, the company began development of a
graphical operating system intended to extend the lifespan of the Commodore 64, which industry analysts were beginning to see as increasingly obsoleted by the
IBM's line of PCs and
Apple's
Macintosh. This operating system project was eventually realized as
GEOS, released in 1986 for the Commodore 64 and
Commodore 128. GEOS received glowing reviews at the 1986
Consumer Electronics Show and sold in great numbers. The meteoric growth of the company led to stresses on its finances and customer service department. In June 1987, the company hired Dennis Rowland, a then-recent
MBA graduate from
Harvard, to be Berkeley Softworks'
chief operating officer. In 1988, the company released GEOS for the Apple II, providing this microcomputer with its first graphical operating system. The company soon after released applications for GEOS for the Commodore and Apple II, including geoFile (a
database application),
geoPublish (a
desktop publishing suite), and geoCalc (a
spreadsheet application). The success of these applications on the Apple II convinced Apple to develop a graphical
office suite their own,
AppleWorks GS, in the late 1980s. Dougherty had realized the growing
influence of the IBM PC on the personal computer market in the mid-1980s and spurred development of GEOS for the IBM PC in 1986. The company renamed itself to GeoWorks Corporation in 1990 and released version 1.0 of GEOS for the IBM PC in 1991. The GEOS product for the PC was later renamed to
GEOS Ensemble. Initially receiving positive reviews in the technology press, GEOS Ensemble found itself unable to compete with the growing hegemony of
Microsoft's
Windows and was faced with complaints from software vendors finding developing for Ensemble difficult, owing to a lack of an
SDK. Before the company could publish a complete SDK for their recent Ensemble 2.0 in 1992, however,
Windows 3.1 had almost completely dominated the operating systems market for IBM PCs and
compatibles. The company halted advertisements of GEOS Ensemble in computer magazines and largely retreated from the personal computer market by the end of 1993. GeoWorks found reprieve in the
handheld PC and
PDA market, releasing several embedded version of GEOS for devices such as the
Tandy Zoomer as well as products from
AST Research,
Canon, and
Sharp Electronics. In 1994, GeoWorks completed its
initial public offering, offering 1.5 million shares of common stock and infusing the company with capital to keep it afloat. Shortly after its IPO, the company formed partnerships with
Hewlett-Packard and
Novell to provide products for their systems and vice versa. GeoWorks licensed Ensemble to NewDeal in 1996, a company based in
Somerville, Massachusetts, founded by ex-employees of GeoWorks (née Berkeley Softworks). Their incarnation of the product, named NewDeal Office, was offered for older PCs whose processors could not run the latest versions of Windows (then
Windows 95,
Windows 98, and
Windows ME) fast enough. GeoWorks effectively dissolved in 2003, selling off its United Kingdom operations to Teleca Ltd of Sweden that year and seeking bankruptcy protection in the United States around the same time. ==Attempted acquisition by Microsoft, Apple notebooks, and Sun Microsystems==