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What happened to GEM?

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Re: What happened to GEM?

#11

Post by cmrdporcupine »

TMWNN wrote: post #3
zabzonk wrote: post #2

> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time. The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b…

> Not so sure about this. WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.

I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST.

WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?

Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#12

Post by cmrdporcupine »

zabzonk wrote: post #9
ayaros wrote: post #8

There's now a version of GEM you can run on a Lisa. But 68KMLA is down so I have no easy way to link to the relevant thread. :(

Whoo, has anyone actually got a working Lisa? Or is this emulation?

If I recall it's been done on both (emulator and real hardware).

The original version of GEMDOS (the replacement for DOS or CP/M when running on 68k) was in fact developed on the Lisa as a 68k dev machine [also some Motorola VME dev boards I think?) before actual Atari HW was available. So it's a full circle thing.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#13

Post by car »

zabzonk wrote: post #2

> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time. The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b…

Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones.

As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#14

Post by cmrdporcupine »

GEM on the PC was... ick... compared to on the Atari ST.

But the problem with GEM on the Atari ST is that in order to cram it into the 192KB ROM they ripped out some goodies like proportional font support which ended up being in an add-on called "GDOS" which was buggy, used up RAM, and most people didn't have it (it came with things like DTP software etc).

In general this was always the problem with the ST. The Tramiels shipped it early and cheap and awesome and I loved mine ... but then didn't pay enough attention to software updates until it was too late and the world had moved on. Jack Tramiel never really understood the value of a good software platform IMHO.

In the early 90s they seemed to learn the error of their ways, hired some talent, and released full multitasking re-entrant versions of TOS/GEM ... but too late.

GEM's architecture itself underneath actually was clearly built for a mulitasking architecture complete with message passing between applications (via AES application msg send / mailboxes) etc. It just came down to failure to iterate.

Also the article mentions DR "hiring some people from Xerox" but in fact fails to note that the actual original architect and author of GEM itself was hired from Xerox (Lee Lorenzen). He joined up with DR because he tried to pitch Xerox on porting their Star office concepts down to PC-class hardware and they didn't go for it. His pitch video can actually be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMBGRZftS30

Lorzenen later left DR and created Ventura Publisher.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#15

Post by TMWNN »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #11
TMWNN wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not so sure about this. WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.

I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST. WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop? Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.

>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly

Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.

Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.

WordPerfect beat them all.

Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#16

Post by tombert »

I've been on a bit of a rabbit hole with Digital Research in the last few days, specifically because I am utterly fascinated with Concurrent DOS.

I played with Concurrent DOS (and later MultiUser DOS) in PCem and I was utterly amazed. I hadn't realized that there was a preemptive multitasking operating system available to consumers as early as the mid 80's outside of AmigaOS.

I read the Wikipedia and I kind of understand why it didn't catch on, but man I kind of wish DRI (and Gary Kildall) was still around. I suspect if they were, they would have continued to make stuff that was at least interesting.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#17

Post by cmrdporcupine »

TMWNN wrote: post #15
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST. WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop? Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.

>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly Nothing with the power of WordPerfect. Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known. WordPerfect beat them all . Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.

It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php

Re: What happened to GEM?

#18

Post by TMWNN »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #17
TMWNN wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly Nothing with the power of WordPerfect. Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known. WordPerfect beat them all . Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.

It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late. https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php

Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero.

Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#19

Post by cmrdporcupine »

car wrote: post #13
zabzonk wrote: post #2

> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time. The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b…

Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones. As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.

Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle.

Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#20

Post by sys_64738 »

zabzonk wrote: post #2

> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time. The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b…

GEM was in TOS on the later Atari ST models. TOS was named after Jack Tramiel, Tramiel Operating System.
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