MHS-GEEZER

Micro Hard and Soft's Gloriously Execellent, Efficient, and Zealously Enterprising Renderer, or better known as MHS-GEEZER or just GEEZER, is a command-line interface embedded as the core of the OS in all modern Doors computers excluding the NT family. Originally called SF-Eighty Six!, it was a Quick and Dirty program slapped together by a bunch of nerds in 1984 in the then-new quest to create a better operating system.

No Doors OS can run without MHS-GEEZER. In the system itself, MHS-GEEZER can be found as a hidden/system file called GEEZR.sys. The interface to this goes under the name of OLDMAN.EXE or OLDFOLKS.COM, and since NT, ELDER.EXE, as a less embarrassing name.

SF-Eighty Six!
Before there was MHS-GEEZER, the item was called SF-Eighty Six!. It was invented by a group of bright-eyed nerds back in 1984, under the corporate banner of Skeedaddle and Friends. These nerds, by modern standards, would be considered Dorkugese.

In 1980, the first King of Colonial Antarctica laid a reward of ten pounds of pure gold for anyone who could develop a computer operating system and teach him how to use it. This King was a forward-thinker. His many advisors and royal governors scoffed at the idea. Still, the reward was set.

Skeedaddle and Friends decided to be the answer to this call. For four years after, they programmed and developed an operating system literally fit for a king. This command-line interface was a very simple one, but amazing for its time and functional on any machine that could read the proper storage medium that the OS was stored on.

These nerds presented their creation to the King, who had it installed on his state-of-the-art computer. The nerds walked him through it, and eventually, the King mastered the console. The nerds had written a word processing program for the King, as well. The King wrote his decree of completion and transfer of the reward using this software.

Now rich, Skeedaddle and Friends commercialized SF-Eighty Six! and it became a hit amongst the small computer using base of penguins and others.

MHS-GEEZER
However, like many successful businesses, Skeedaddle and Friends was gobbled up by Micro Hard and Soft in 1990 for the sum of 1,000,000 Finwes.

Now the sole owner of SF-Eighty Six!, MHS began to edit and tweak its code just in time to bundle it with the first ever Doors operating system. They, of course, presented it as their own idea, not crediting Skeedaddle and Friends for doing most, if not all, of the work. Rebranded MHS-GEEZER, it was shipped with Doors 1.0 as soon as it was taken out of beta mode.

Like the early Doors, it didn't really take off. However, with the successful marketing of Doors 3.1, MHS soon became a computer juggernaut.

When NT came, the kernel was rewritten from scratch. The only Doors versions using GEEZER were ME and older now. However, for backwards compatibility, GEEZER and 9x were included and emulated to run on the new architectures that it ran on. The console was rewritten to be much more powerful, and also to not depend on GEEZER, so it is only loaded to memory when a GEEZER application is launched.

Unfortunately, this did not turn out how it was supposed to: since it also supposed to be able to run legacy drivers, GEEZER was loaded nearly all the time. Since most drivers are coded for GEEZER, even some recent and or bundled ones also, it slows the system down with poor classic design, and makes NT seem like a worse OS than it seems, layered with cruft.

Improvements to accomodate modern UI
Over the years, MHS-GEEZER has been upgraded to accomodate for modern computing neccessities, like layers of folders over nine units deep.

However, to this day, no MHS goon has been able to conquer the 8.3 filename threshold. Instead, they emulated it with a database at the disk root, and API applications used it, and wouldn't know the difference. Good hackers have, though, made a workaround so it's integrated into the file system, but this is unofficial.

Since NT, the filesystem has also rewritten: it now has native support for LFN and various other features. For compatibility however, whenever a GEEZER application needs IO, it generates 8.3 file names on the fly.

Trivia

 * This is a loose parody of 86-DOS and MS-DOS.