What happened to GEM? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened to GEM?

#81

Post by cout » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 11:47 PM UTC

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 dosshell on IBM PC DOS 4.0. I don't remember that feature. Was it added in 5?

Re: What happened to GEM?

#82

Post by cout » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 11:48 PM UTC

roryirvine wrote: post #75

tombert wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't around in the 80's, since I hadn't even been conceived yet, so it's hard for me to really know what the landscape was like then. Just reading about all the cool stuff that was available in the 80's, a part of me is kind of baffled that Microsoft was the one that ended up winning. DR-DOS and Concurrent DOS seem, at least in a lot of ways, objectively better than MS-DOS. I'm kind of surprised that Microsoft di…

I suspect it was largely IBM that was winning, for most of the 80s at least. MS was seen as being very much the junior partner. Things started to wobble badly around 1988, with the release of the bug-ridden PC/MS DOS 4.x and the travails of OS/2 1.x. Most people doggedly stuck to DOS 3.3 despite its limitations (particularly the max HD size of 32 MB, at a time when 40 MB disks had become commonplace). The IBM/MS wobb…

What was buggy about DOS 4? I ran it for years until I switched to DR DOS 5.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#83

Post by my123 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

cout wrote: post #82

roryirvine wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it was largely IBM that was winning, for most of the 80s at least. MS was seen as being very much the junior partner. Things started to wobble badly around 1988, with the release of the bug-ridden PC/MS DOS 4.x and the travails of OS/2 1.x. Most people doggedly stuck to DOS 3.3 despite its limitations (particularly the max HD size of 32 MB, at a time when 40 MB disks had become commonplace). The IBM/MS wobb…

What was buggy about DOS 4? I ran it for years until I switched to DR DOS 5.

There were two entirely separate DOS 4s

The multi-tasking DOS 4 that had its next release be branded as OS/2

and the other one, a conventional DOS stopgap product

Re: What happened to GEM?

#84

Post by badsectoracula » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #36

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.

You can do a lot of stuff with the system as it is since it does expose a lot of its internals (and when you need to replicate functionality, there isn't that much in there to replicate so it is perfectly doable), but my point is that it wasn't as flexible or capable as Windows 1.0.

It wasn't just Microsoft's marketing skills that made Windows overshadow GEM, it was also that Windows was genuinely a better product - both from a technical and a functional perspective.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#85

Post by steve1977 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #79

steve1977 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe. Even though dongles were a popular copy protection. Then again, software like Cubase didn't use much of GEM IIRC and did their own graphics.

> There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe. Hence why Gerhard Lengeling put at least as much time into the design of the dongle as he did Creator/Notator itself.

I remember these things for all the dongles. I think C-Lab had something similar, not sure anymore though (was using Cubase at the time).

https://axelhartmanndesign.com/steinberg-midex/