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.

Founded with $2 million of venture capital, Imagic was initially successful but collapsed in the wake of the 1983 video game market crash.

[4] 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.

[6] In June 1987, the company hired Dennis Rowland, a then-recent MBA graduate from Harvard, to be Berkeley Softworks' chief operating officer.

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[citation needed] finding developing for Ensemble difficult, owing to a lack of an SDK.

[3] 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.

Shortly after its IPO, the company formed partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Novell to provide products for their systems and vice versa.

The PC OS standard was a winner-take-all sweepstakes with billions of dollars hanging in the balance, the world doesn't really want to have to write software for multiple OSes.

I'd have done the same in their place.At around the same time, GeoWorks got into extensive discussions with Apple about developing a low-cost notebook laptop which would run GEOS but with a modified Macintosh UI.

"[12] Brian had also stated that the object-oriented user interface of PC/GEOS is to this day the most sophisticated GUI technology ever to be built in an operating system.