Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to GEM?

dfarq.homeip.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 85 posts

Re: What happened to GEM?

#61

Post by lproven »

gbalint wrote: post #38

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

> we never had a single program to run on it

Amstrad GEM came with a couple of apps thrown in!

LocoScript BASIC 2, a full GUI BASIC language, and GEM Paint.

Pics of the media here:

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/computers/Amstrad%20PC1000/softwar...

The famous demo Tiger image on an original 'Strad:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/12gmqrm/the_famo...

Re: What happened to GEM?

#62

Post by zabzonk »

einr wrote: post #56
zabzonk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there weren't too many Lisas (working or otherwise) when the thing came out!

Well OK, "a lot" can mean a lot of different things depending on context ;) In the vintage computer collector/enthusiast scene, there are probably dozens of working Lisas. How's that?

Yep, I know about all that - I had big cupboard full of the damn things in my flat in london [various ataris (6502 and 68k based ones), dragon 32 (coco lookalike), peculiar IBM pc clones, and other stuff]

A few years ago I got my nephew to do up the flat for sale, and he junked the lot - at some point you have to get rid of things.

I will never buy anything except a laptop again.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#64

Post by lproven »

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…

Here is a different recent -- and IMHO much better -- history which covers that:

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...

Re: What happened to GEM?

#65

Post by lproven »

tombert wrote: post #25
mikestorrent wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I saw that when going down my rabbit hole. Definitely a cool and useful thing for what it is. I just think that Concurrent DOS is cool because it is proper multitasking; proper time slicing and everything! And you could have multiple users logging into the same computer with terminals, à la Unix, all in the mid 80s! I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to…

> I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to try and make a case for them to release the source code

Yeah, me too.

You can read a little of the results of my digging here:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/the_many_derivatives_...

Happy to compare notes -- my email is in my profile, or I'm easily Googled.

Well, these days, Google will tell you I'm an aardvark or some other bot slop, but you can find me. I always use this screen name everywhere.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#66

Post by lproven »

aa-jv wrote: post #39
mikestorrent wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

OMG yes. I thought this myself at the time.

The thing is that they were rivals.

QEMM386 bolted protect-mode memory-management on top of DOS. DESQview bolted multitasking on top of QEMM. DESQview/X bolted a Unix-like GUI on top of that.

DR just sold multitasking OSes for the PC: Multiuser DOS for use with terminals, FlexOS with X/GEM for realtime stuff.

Symantec bought Quarterdeck. Perhaps Novell should have bought it first.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#67

Post by cmrdporcupine »

lproven wrote: post #64
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…

Here is a different recent -- and IMHO much better -- history which covers that: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...

Odd it doesn't do much on the Atari ST lineage really apart from mentioning it. Lots of articles seem to have this problem.

There was a lot more going on in the 68k / Atari ST line than on PC, in the end.

In the 90s most of that was in Germany though. Read up on "Magic" OS sometime.

And these days, the modern variant of GEM is really EmuTOS and also Xaaes on the ST line.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#68

Post by tombert »

lproven wrote: post #65
tombert wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I saw that when going down my rabbit hole. Definitely a cool and useful thing for what it is. I just think that Concurrent DOS is cool because it is proper multitasking; proper time slicing and everything! And you could have multiple users logging into the same computer with terminals, à la Unix, all in the mid 80s! I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to…

> I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to try and make a case for them to release the source code Yeah, me too. You can read a little of the results of my digging here: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/the_many_derivatives_... Happy to compare notes -- my email is in my profile, or I'm easily Googled. Well, these days, Google will tell you I'm an aardvar…

I sent you an email to the address in your profile. Would love to compare notes on this stuff.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#69

Post by xnorswap »

igravious wrote: post #43
pjmlp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DR-DOS 5 was alright and Viewmax a nice way to manage files and directories.

DR-DOS was more than alright, if Microsoft hadn't smothered it the computing world would look very very different today … I'm sure this is a mostly forgotten part of computing lore; apologies for the Gemini's Overview: “Microsoft actively stifled DR-DOS in the early 1990s through anti-competitive tactics, primarily using the "AARD code" in Windows 3.1, which deliberately created compatibility errors to scare users aw…

> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment would have been just as interesting as the first line followed by a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code .

Re: What happened to GEM?

#70

Post by roryirvine »

tombert wrote: post #25
mikestorrent wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I saw that when going down my rabbit hole. Definitely a cool and useful thing for what it is. I just think that Concurrent DOS is cool because it is proper multitasking; proper time slicing and everything! And you could have multiple users logging into the same computer with terminals, à la Unix, all in the mid 80s! I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to…

I think the main problem was that systems to take advantage of it tended to be either fully bespoke or were produced in runs of dozens or hundreds at most. Customisation and installation (including wiring the terminals, in the days before networking was common) were protracted processes as well.

As a result, they were priced against the low-end of mid-range systems - so rather more than you might expect from looking at the raw bill of materials.

Their niche was rapidly eroded by simply running multiple single user PCs at the low end, and networked small Unix systems at the high end - both of which benefitted from higher economies of scale and needed less systems integration work.

Definitely interesting in a "what might have been?" way, though. I suspect that if DR had done a deal with IBM, then we might have ended up going down that sort of path for most of the 80s.

Post reply on HN