Comment by rmason

20 hours ago

I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast.

For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3.1 when I first used the Mosaic browser on the then new world wide web and my life was never the same again.

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rmason

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lproven  3 hours ago

> I don't know what happened to GEM.

Choosing to interpret you literally:

Apple sued, and DR had to cripple GEM 2. The Atari ST version was unaffected.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/01/business/digital-research...

https://books.google.im/books?id=w3IudMVoEusC&pg=PA2&redir_e...

Caldera made it GPL in 1999.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1999/04/27/gem-the-gui-t...

The FreeGEM project modernised it and added back not only all the functionality that DR removed, such as overlapping windows and desktop icons and things, but also additional features from the runtime-only GEM/4 and GEM/5, such as Bézier curves and things.

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/freegem2.html

OpenGEM was the last distro of FreeGEM getting updates, and it's included in FreeDOS.

https://multiboot-windows.dscloud.me/All_Pages_for_DOS_GUIs/...

Back on the Atari ST, EmuTOS started out as a minimal stub boot ROM for the all-FOSS AFROS replacement OS for the Aranym emulator; over time, EmuTOS evolved into a complete FOSS replacement ROM for the ST line -- and to recreate GEM, they went back to some of those Caldera source files.

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

As to the bigger more general question of why PC GEM didn't compete...

DR's GUI was originally one element of DR's catalogue. GEM ran on Concurrent DOS, and DR-DOS included a cut-down version that's just a file-manager and app-launcher, called ViewMAX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewMAX

(The beta version of ViewMAX 3 ended up FOSS too.)

DR had a full multitasking DOS-compatible OS on the 286, something like 4 years before OS/2 1.0. However, it used a feature that Intel removed from the shipping 80286 chip. The shipping PC AT could not multitask DOS apps on Concurrent DOS 286.

So DR pivoted: it turned CDOS 286 into FlexOS, an RTOS that happened to have some DOS compatibility. It turned GEM into X/GEM, a multitasking version that could use the underlying OS's multitasking.

(ViewMax on DR-DOS 6 can manage multitasking full-screen DOS sessions using DR's TaskMAX multitasker.)

FlexOS with X/GEM evolved into many forms, and was sold by Siemens and many other companies, as an embedded control RTOS for all kinds of hardware.

The last ones on sale were for cash registers -- PC-based point-of-sale tills. IBM 4690 OS was still on sale in the 2000s, and it's based on DR FlexOS and X/GEM, with app development in Java that displays in a GUI that was a remote descendant of GEM.

Toshiba still supports it.

https://commerce.toshiba.com/wps/portal/marketing/?urile=wcm...

cmrdporcupine  15 hours ago

GEM was very much an incomplete project, is my take on it. Which makes sense when you consider DR had to be -- seemingly for the life of the company -- pretty scrappy. Once Windows was on the scene, there was no point in them dumping a boatload of resources into it.

Its original advocate and designer, Lee Lorenzen, left DR to go create his own startup and make Ventura Publisher (which shipped with its own copy of GEM). Which was then bought up by Xerox. Which is also where Lorenzen came from in the first place before DR. (GEM came out of his desire to build out a Xerox Star-like system for commodity PCs, which he tried to pitch at Xerox but failed, so did at DR instead.)

On the ST side it went off in other directions, the two codebases forked significantly.