With the computer market dominated by companies like Microsoft and Apple, and with the growing popularity of Linux, many people would think that software like Breadbox Ensemble is a quaint anachronism. Frank Fischer, president and CEO of Breadbox Computer Company, strongly disagrees. He told me that it's not about keeping an older technology alive. Fischer says that his company believes "GEOS remains a highly competitive and viable alternative for many different applications."
The greatest strength of Breadbox Ensemble, according to Fischer, is that it "Ensemble and our educational software still runs extremely well even on an old 386. This makes one-to-one computing absolutely feasible, even for the poorest schools, school districts, states and countries."
Users of Breadbox Ensemble, and other versions of GEOS, love it because it's small, fast, and does most (if not all) of what they need to do.
Andreas Bollhalder has been using GEOS since 1992, He's used it to do everything from writing letters to creating technical drawings to keeping track of various personal data. He says that Breadbox Ensemble handles "99% of my needs in creating documents." He adds that if he tried to keep up with Microsoft Office, "I would have spent five times more money then with Breadbox."
Robert Leone got bitten by the GEOS bug in 1998. He was always more-than pleasantly surprised at its incredibly low system requirements. Leone told me: "I wonder how many old school district and home user hand-me-down '386 and '486 computers had their useful lifetimes doubled by the availability of Breadbox Ensemble (or GEOS in one form or another)."
I'm one of the Ensemble faithful, too. I've written a number of articles with it, and even cobbled together Web pages in Ensemble's HTML editor. Using some of Breadbox's software, I've also created presentations, catalogued my personal library, and balanced my budget -- all on a small notebook that was made in the mid-1990s.