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What happened to GEM?

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Re: What happened to GEM?

#31

Post by rmason »

I ran GEM on some of my early computers. Also bought both Windows 1 and Windows 2 to try. GEM was clearly superior from a user stand point. Windows 3 shipped and they just disappeared.

I was really interested in how they would respond to the challenge. IBM was working publicly with Microsoft on OS/2 so they had to know the market was going to change. The only real surprise was when Microsoft went all in on marketing Windows 3 and the rise of Office.

Borland tried to compete against Office and got killed. Perhaps with a competent GUI operating system it might have been different.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#33

Post by rjsw »

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…

I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#34

Post by rjsw »

car wrote: post #10

Apple sued DRI, which resulted in the crippling of GEM, the glaring one I remember were static windows. You heard that right, windows were not resizable but had fixed screen locations in the PC version. Thankfully Atari licensed GEM for their 68000 machines before the lawsuit, and wasn't affected by these changes. The Atari ST (Sixteen/Thirtytwo) was very Mac like at the time. It even ran the Mac OS from Apple ROMs (…

Windows were only fixed in the desktop application, you could still move and resize them in your own apps.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#35

Post by rjsw »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #14

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 Trami…

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

It was fine on an Olivetti M24. Same screen resolution and colour as the ST, Logitech mouse plugged into the back of the keyboard.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#36

Post by rjsw »

badsectoracula wrote: post #22

> One could argue DRI bowed out too soon. Then again, it’s questionable whether it would have won against Windows anyway. Microsoft was the larger company and had OEM agreements with all of the major PC makers. Well, it is also that Windows even at version 1.0 was much more capable than GEM. Better documentation, better tools, better API and better functionality. GEM was really just a shell over DOS and applications…

I wrote a hypertext system that created dialog boxes on the fly and used the callback for the custom object type to implement links.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#37

Post by ErroneousBosh »

zabzonk wrote: post #7
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.

Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.

> Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good

The same rubber domes and plastic plungers were Totally Unacceptable on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ and QL, Not Very Good on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and just what everyone uses on PCs today.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#38

Post by gbalint »

My family's first computer in the 80s was an Amstrad PC1512 (an IBM XT clone). We received 4 nice colorful system floppies with it, and it included a GEM Desktop. I remember sometimes logging into GEM, because it looked awesome, but we never had a single program to run on it, so it was practically useless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlUTzydzLVI

Re: What happened to GEM?

#39

Post by aa-jv »

mikestorrent wrote: post #23
tombert wrote: post #16

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 unders…

A lot of folks never used it, but MS DOS 5.0 came with DOSSHELL which actually had support for task switching - not quite concurrency, but it worked on a 286. From what I've learned since, when you switched away from a program using Ctrl + Esc, DOSSHELL suspended it and dumped its conventional memory to a swap file on disk. Used this to great effect so I could swap back and forth between QBASIC and other utilities. h…

I used that DOSSHELL method for a while until I got Quarterdeck Desqview set up - and from that point on, to me DOS was nothing more than a terminal interface to my pizzabox.

Sure would've been nice if the Desqview engineers and the GEM guys could've merged their efforts...

Re: What happened to GEM?

#40

Post by manytimesaway »

empressplay wrote: post #24
sys_64738 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not Jack, his son, Sam.

None of these are true. It's "The Operating System" according to era documentation.
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