My first computer was one of those cheap Amstrad pc clones, and it came with GEM on top of MS-DOS. GEM looked good but took a while to load from 5"1/4 floppy, and once loaded there were no useful graphical applications to speak of. I quickly stopped loading it and learned the DOS command line... Which came useful later to transition to Linux!
cbdevidal 4 hours ago [-]
Im glad to hear that. An Amstrad also was my first computer. I accidentally wiped out the GEM floppy almost immediately after receiving the computer, not being aware what the format command actually did. So I was bummed for never having access to the cool GUI. Only the “dumb old DOS prompt”; Which, like you, forced me to learn DOS commands and eventually, Linux. I am a UNIX sysadmin today, and knowing DOS well was the key to getting my first IT job. So I’m glad to hear I didn’t miss out on much :-)
noufalibrahim 4 hours ago [-]
IBM PC "compatibles" and pirated DOS floppy disks are truly underrated. They built the foundation for a generation of software developers.
spankibalt 6 hours ago [-]
Once color-adjusted, OpenGEM [1, 2] looks hot in high-res. Visually, certainly one of the most beautiful GUIs. The rest of the gems are not (so) agreeable.
Atari ST GEM variants look pretty great on higher res video cards and newer hardware.
These days we've got a full open source stack of the whole ST OS, from the BIOS up to GEM. Including variants that offer Unix-like multitasking with protected memory, etc.
I vaguely remember GEM in MS-DOS because it was the only software I knew of (iirc) that supported the mouse we had. One of those early optical mice with a metal mousepad with a grid of tiny reflective dots. No one else I knew that had a PC had a mouse back then.
It also had graphics programs. One for bitmaps and one for vectors, iirc. Me and my friend used to play with those. I don't even remember what else GEM was for. To me it was just a way to launch those editors to draw things and I did not have access to any other graphics applications in DOS until years later.
cmrdporcupine 4 minutes ago [-]
In the Atari ST world GEM is still an existing and maintained thing, open source and somewhat modernized.
As a kid I had Atari 520ST(M) and GEM was like a… window to a magic world. It was so different from anything I had seen before (older Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64).
Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.
The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)
joz1-k 4 hours ago [-]
I would even say, that GEM itself saved the Atari ST platform from an instant failure. Apple Macintosh had an original Mac GUI, and the Commodore Amiga (developed by a former Atari team) was technically more advanced in many ways, even supporting a true preemptive multitasking. GEM on Atari ST offered a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price.
jhbadger 21 minutes ago [-]
The nickname of the machine was even "Jackintosh" (from Macintosh and Jack Tramiel, who had left Commodore and then bought Atari's computer division from Warner). At least with the 520ST they really positioned it as a cheap Mac equivilent even bundling it with a monochrome monitor
ochrist 7 hours ago [-]
I used GEM on some PCs around 1990. At that time I had an Archimedes and was studying in a computer school. I did some DTP (a school magazine) together with a couple of classmates, and we could have done it on my Arch. But then they would have been out of it, so we used their more ordinary PCs and used GEM on them. It worked smoothly and was very responsive.
lwhi 6 hours ago [-]
I remember using a DTP on GEM called Finesse around the same time!
roryirvine 2 hours ago [-]
There was also Ventura Publisher, which was one of the most important DTP packages at the time. It ran under GEM, and was probably the biggest driver of GEM sales at the tail end of the 1980s.
Unfortunately, it was bought by Xerox in 1990-ish, with development slowing from that point onwards - not helped by a decision to port it to OS/2 ahead of Windows, which turned out to have been a sub-optimal choice once Win3 began to take off.
Its main competitor was Aldus Pagemaker, which was originally a Mac app but became available on Win/386 just as the MacII line was beginning to stagnate. By the time that QuarkXPress finally arrived on the PC in 1992, GEM was long since dead and OS/2 was nearly so. Xerox sold Ventura to Corel in the mid-90s, but it never managed to regain its early popularity.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
The first MS-DOS I used was MS-DOS 3.3 at the school computer lab, however when eventually I got my own PC, it came with DR-DOS 5, and the Gem inspired ViewMax.
I wanted to like viewmax, but I think Digital Research was short-sighted. They intended it to compete with dosshell.exe, but the real competitor was windows. I was excited to get to play with GEM, but I had no way to write programs for it.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
Back then it still wasn't a given that Windows would really take off as it did.
For example, I only got that computer because getting one with OS/2 was out of my budget, and actually what I really wanted but for several reasons did not buy one, was an Amiga.
rjsw 6 hours ago [-]
I did GEM application development on an Olivetti M24 and various Atari ST models.
englishrookie 3 hours ago [-]
Cool! I may have used some of your applications on my Atari 1040 ST back in 1988. Which ones did you work on?
Western0 4 hours ago [-]
I dream about mac os 1 and (or) GEM desktop as SDL4 library.
Many small project need gui.
The original BBC computer was way to small for something like this, but you could get a version of the BBC Master that was able to run GEM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master
tecleandor 7 hours ago [-]
Ha! I came to say exactly the same! I (my dad) had a PC1512, CGA with B/W screen. It came with a serial mouse that we only took out of the box when we used GDE. I have to say we didn't use it much, as we were used to DOS and the "I boot the computer and directly run the application/game I want to use".
My dad used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot (I guess that it was v2.2 or so in the Amstrad).
1. [https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/ogemdesk.png]
2. [https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/gem256.png]
These days we've got a full open source stack of the whole ST OS, from the BIOS up to GEM. Including variants that offer Unix-like multitasking with protected memory, etc.
https://os-projects.eu/sites/default/files/2018-05/freemint....
http://myaes.lutece.net/images/beta7.jpg
It also had graphics programs. One for bitmaps and one for vectors, iirc. Me and my friend used to play with those. I don't even remember what else GEM was for. To me it was just a way to launch those editors to draw things and I did not have access to any other graphics applications in DOS until years later.
In the forked and (heavily) maintained form of EmuTOS (GPL, https://emutos.sourceforge.io/)
Or in the from-scratch rewrite in the form of MyAES http://myaes.lutece.net/
Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.
The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)
Unfortunately, it was bought by Xerox in 1990-ish, with development slowing from that point onwards - not helped by a decision to port it to OS/2 ahead of Windows, which turned out to have been a sub-optimal choice once Win3 began to take off.
Its main competitor was Aldus Pagemaker, which was originally a Mac app but became available on Win/386 just as the MacII line was beginning to stagnate. By the time that QuarkXPress finally arrived on the PC in 1992, GEM was long since dead and OS/2 was nearly so. Xerox sold Ventura to Corel in the mid-90s, but it never managed to regain its early popularity.
https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/viewmax1.html
For example, I only got that computer because getting one with OS/2 was out of my budget, and actually what I really wanted but for several reasons did not buy one, was an Amiga.
Felt pretty advanced compared to BBC computer!
My dad used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot (I guess that it was v2.2 or so in the Amstrad).