Yet, I could do
* word processing
* desktop publishing
* working with scanned documents
* spreadsheets
* graphics
* digital painting
* music production
* gaming (even chess)
* programming (besides BASIC and ASM I had a Pascal compiler)
* CAD and 3D design (Giga CAD [1], fascinated me to no end)
* Video creation [2]
For all this tasks there were standalone applications [3] with their own GUI [4]. GEOS was an integrated GUI environment with its own applications and way ahead of its times [5].
It still blows my mind how all this could work.
My first Linux ran on a 386DX with 4M of RAM, but this probably as low as on can get. Even the installer choked on that little RAM and one had to create a swap partition and swapon manually after booting but before the installer ran. In text mode it was pretty usable though, X11 worked and I remember having GNU chess runnning, but it was quite slow.
[1] https://youtu.be/ZEf9XMrc5u8
[2] OK, this one is a bit of a stretch but there actually was Videofox for creating video titles and shopping window animations: https://www.pagetable.com/docs/scanntronik_manuals/videofox....
[3] Some came on extension modules which saved RAM or brought a bit of extra RAM, but we are still talking kilobytes. For examples see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1730
[4] Or sort of TUI if you like; the strict separation of text and graphics mode wasn't a thing in the home computer era.
[5] The standalone apps were still better. So, as advanced GEOS was, I believe it was not used productively much.
But if you had to use that software now, you'd say (justly) that it's extremely basic and limited, and that interoperability with other systems is not great.
What can be done ≠ what's comfortable to use.
For me it's more about the excitement that the bright future lay ahead of us so clearly mixed with a slight disappointment that I sometimes feel we could have made more out of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system...
Obviously there were huge limitations but it shows what can be done.