alt.hn

3/20/2026 at 10:45:52 PM

What happened to GEM?

 https://dfarq.homeip.net/whatever-happened-to-gem/

by naves

3/25/2026 at 12:12:53 AM

I can't say I'm wild about a world where Digital Research won. When they were dominant with CP/M, the tools and documentation were bad to the point where most machines had Z80 processors and DR only provided an 8080 assembler, so you had to DB significant bits of code to get the missing opcodes. Developing RSXs to access bank-switched memory under CP/M 3 could have been so much easier with a few examples and perhaps debugging tools. MS/DOS was just so much easier.

by tengwar2

3/25/2026 at 9:07:02 AM

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

by pjmlp

3/25/2026 at 9:58:28 AM

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 away from the competing operating system. Microsoft also used FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) tactics, such as hinting at future incompatibilities.

Key Tactics Used by Microsoft:

    The AARD Code: Windows 3.1 installer contained heavily obfuscated code, discovered in 1992, that specifically checked if the system was running DR-DOS. If detected, it displayed a fake "Non-Fatal Error" message to induce panic.

    Vaporware Announcements: Microsoft announced upcoming versions of MS-DOS to dampen demand for current versions of DR-DOS.

    OEM Pressure: Microsoft leveraged its monopoly to ensure pre-installed Windows came with MS-DOS, hindering DR-DOS's retail market success.
While Digital Research released a patch (the "business update") to bypass the AARD code, the damage to market perception and OEM deals was significant. The case was later part of legal battles between Caldera (which acquired DR-DOS) and Microsoft.”

https://share.google/aimode/JJs7wliOGtvnme6LY” [Tech Monitor/Wikipedia]

by igravious

3/25/2026 at 11:48:39 AM

Yeah we know of the issues, and related lawsuits, and here we are OEMs still only sell GNU/Linux devices on their online shops, leaving to regular consumer stores Android, WebOS and Chromebooks.

Ah, and Valve had to come up with Proton, as game studios can't be bothered to natively target GNU/Linux.

by pjmlp

3/25/2026 at 12:25:20 AM

I remember using a Z80 assembler on a CP/M 1.x machine, way back when. If it wasn't by DRI could it possibly have been (shock, horror) Microsoft??? We did have a Microsoft Fortran compiler, which was crap, but that was mostly down to being floppy disk based.

Not trying to be funny, I used the assembler a lot, but I really can't remember who supplied it.

Oh, just had a thought - this was on Research Machines 380Zs, so perhaps it was Research Machines home-grown one?

by zabzonk

3/25/2026 at 9:40:25 AM

Yes, there were one or two third party assemblers available. From memory, the issue was with the downstream tools - so for instance on CP/M 3.0, I think you had to use the DR one to be able to build an RSX (equivalent of a TSR under DOS. You could count the number of 8080 CP/M 3.0 machines on the fingers of one foot.

You've reminded me that I have a 380Z or 480Z in the loft - I must get it going again.

by tengwar2

3/25/2026 at 12:00:54 AM

> 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) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master.

I think many others may have similar thoughts.

by zabzonk

3/25/2026 at 10:51:53 AM

I got all the GEM docs through Archie at umich.edu. You could get everything there including the entire GNU toolchain and MiNT so you could have a real development environment.

Between DM sessions, of course. Or Time Bandits.

by bregma

3/25/2026 at 1:48:46 AM

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

by sys_64738

3/25/2026 at 2:27:08 AM

Not Jack, his son, Sam.

by empressplay

3/25/2026 at 9:02:34 AM

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

by manytimesaway

3/25/2026 at 7:35:17 AM

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.

by rjsw

3/25/2026 at 1:11:19 AM

Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones.

As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.

by car

3/25/2026 at 2:01:39 AM

> As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.

Yes, there were, but compared with the Windows textbooks and Microsoft-supplied documentation for Windows, they were really not good. In the UK, they were translated (not well) from German. At least all the ones I owned were almost completely lacking in examples, and examples are really what you want when learning to use something.

by zabzonk

3/25/2026 at 1:43:20 AM

Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle.

Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 10:30:11 AM

Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.

by car

3/25/2026 at 11:03:35 AM

Going down this rabbit hole, I realize that ST hardware for musicians is still huge. And the dongles as still working as intended, apparently.

And then this blew my mind:

https://re-falcon.com

Quite the underground scene:

https://indyclassic.org

by car

3/25/2026 at 11:57:39 AM

I have two Falcons here they're a compelling machine and still fun to play with.

But if I were to ask for a machine repro, a new motherboard, it would be in a different PCB form factor to get it into an ITX or m-ITX case. Because it's the cases and keyboards that go, not the machine.

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 11:20:01 AM

People attempted to patch the routines decades ago and it never produced a stable result.

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 4:54:27 AM

The dongle has already been reverse engineered in the last couple of years and replicas are for sale.

by msephton

3/25/2026 at 11:04:11 AM

Yes I am aware of this, and read the HDL to understand what they did. But they are hardware only. The point is to run in emulation.

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 12:12:05 AM

> Not so sure about this.

WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.

by TMWNN

3/25/2026 at 12:38:07 AM

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.

by zabzonk

3/25/2026 at 8:24:33 AM

> 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.

by ErroneousBosh

3/25/2026 at 1:06:24 AM

I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST.

WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?

Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 1:13:59 AM

>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly

Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.

Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.

WordPerfect beat them all.

Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.

by TMWNN

3/25/2026 at 2:44:16 AM

> WordPerfect beat them all.

It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switched to Word and Windows vi clones.

I remember the CP/M version of WordStar gave you a patching tool that allowed you to insert screen and keyboard handlers in machine code, for your specific hardware (to speed things up), into the WS code. I can still remember how clever I thought I was when I got this to work!

by zabzonk

3/25/2026 at 5:08:04 AM

My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC.

by msephton

3/25/2026 at 1:25:07 AM

It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 1:37:36 AM

Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero.

Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.

by TMWNN

3/25/2026 at 1:05:35 AM

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 (Spectre 128 and Aladin) on its much cheaper hardware.

by car

3/25/2026 at 7:37:00 AM

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

by rjsw

3/25/2026 at 10:22:25 AM

Didn't know, thanks for pointing that out. Never used GEM outside Atari, just something I read at the time.

by car

3/25/2026 at 4:53:01 AM

How much was an Atari plus Spectre/Aladin?

by msephton

3/25/2026 at 10:54:44 AM

The problem was you also needed to buy a Mac to get the licensed ROMs.

by bregma

3/25/2026 at 8:38:25 AM

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

by gbalint

3/25/2026 at 6:51:39 AM

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.

by rmason

3/25/2026 at 7:29:43 AM

Starting from the original codebase I'm working on a RUST version, just for fun.

by faserx

3/25/2026 at 1:12:48 AM

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 Tramiels shipped it early and cheap and awesome and I loved mine ... but then didn't pay enough attention to software updates until it was too late and the world had moved on. Jack Tramiel never really understood the value of a good software platform IMHO.

In the early 90s they seemed to learn the error of their ways, hired some talent, and released full multitasking re-entrant versions of TOS/GEM ... but too late.

GEM's architecture itself underneath actually was clearly built for a mulitasking architecture complete with message passing between applications (via AES application msg send / mailboxes) etc. It just came down to failure to iterate.

Also the article mentions DR "hiring some people from Xerox" but in fact fails to note that the actual original architect and author of GEM itself was hired from Xerox (Lee Lorenzen). He joined up with DR because he tried to pitch Xerox on porting their Star office concepts down to PC-class hardware and they didn't go for it. His pitch video can actually be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMBGRZftS30

Lorzenen later left DR and created Ventura Publisher.

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 10:09:35 AM

Wow, I just remembered using AES when I wrote an 'accessory' (menu bar app) that converted bitmap to vector for an ST DTP app that supported both. An early form of plugin I suppose. Pretty ahead of the MS mess at the time.

by car

3/25/2026 at 7:38:58 AM

> 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.

by rjsw

3/25/2026 at 1:17:22 AM

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 understand why it didn't catch on, but man I kind of wish DRI (and Gary Kildall) was still around. I suspect if they were, they would have continued to make stuff that was at least interesting.

by tombert

3/25/2026 at 2:26:28 AM

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.

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

by mikestorrent

3/25/2026 at 2:35:58 AM

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 try and make a case for them to release the source code, but I have had a heck of a time getting ahold of anyone that might be able to point me in the right direction. I suspect the rights for it now reside with OpenText or something and they don’t even realize it.

by tombert

3/25/2026 at 8:49:34 AM

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...

by aa-jv

3/25/2026 at 2:21:43 AM

> 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 were actually DOS programs that called a special interrupt handler to make API calls. While this allowed any language that could make EXE files and call interrupts to be used to make GEM apps, it also meant that GEM inherited all the limitations from DOS, like the inability to run multiple applications at the same time (DR did eventually make GEM/XM that allowed switching between applications but it was still only one application active at any given time). Windows meanwhile not only could run multiple applications, but it also had a software-based virtual memory system that allowed applications to swap in/out both data and code to fit in the available memory (this required custom compiler support so, unlike GEM, you couldn't use any old compiler but on the other hand it you could make more complex applications).

The GEM API was also very barebones, you could create windows but all you could do with them was to draw inside. Dialog boxes were a completely separate thing that could take a tree of "objects" to draw inside them but even then the functionality was limited (the object types are hardcoded and while there is a "custom" type, all it does is provide a callback for drawing). You could work around some of the functionality by implementing some of it yourself - for example there is a call to draw an object tree (object trees are actually a flat array of fixed size structures where the first three fields define 16bit indices inside the tree for each object - this probably saved some bytes of memory at the cost of flexibility loss and TBH the extra bytes added for the code to work with the tree probably ate back those saved bytes, if not made things worse) so i think (never tried it) you could draw buttons, etc in a window when you receive the WM_REDRAW message but there is no event message propagation.

Meanwhile on Windows everything is a "window" in a window tree with a consistent approach to how things are handled. On GEM everything is a special case.

I get the impression that the GEM developers basically had some idea of what their desktop would look like and implement the functionality to do just that and nothing else with little room for flexibility or later expandability.

EDIT: also the graphics functionality was very limited, e.g. with hardcoded colors. Here are some GEM API docs in case anyone is interested:

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/vdi.html (low level API, draw graphics, input devices, etc)

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/aes.html (relatively high level API, make windows, define dialogs, messages, etc)

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/aestruct.html (some structures)

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/aesmsg.html (event message types)

by badsectoracula

3/25/2026 at 7:41:04 AM

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

by rjsw

3/25/2026 at 3:47:08 AM

Atari ST user here. AES is as you say rather bare bones. In some ways it's more analogous to X windows "Xt" X intrinsics than it is to any "widget" toolkit -- in that it gives you the facilities for constructing trees of drawn objects, registering applications, communicating between applications, receiving events, opening windows, redrawing windows, etc. but for actual active widgets ... only provides premade alerts, dialogs, windows, menubars, and a file selector. But in fact those pieces are made from object trees like you say. So, yes, with your own event handling you absolutely could write your own widgets directly into the window by drawing an object tree, and more savy developers did that.

I suspect there was maybe an intent to eventually build something higher level above it, still. Just that never happened, or was never standardized. There are in fact some C-level libraries for the Atari ST that do, but they're more recent inventions.

It's not a bad architecture, just incomplete. It wasn't aiming for -- nor would they have had the budget to make -- the same space as MS Windows in that it wasn't a full and complete environment in that way. Even on the Atari ST where they controlled the whole stack instead of being hoisted over MS-DOS.

by cmrdporcupine

3/25/2026 at 12:46:02 AM

There's now a version of GEM you can run on a Lisa. But 68KMLA is down so I have no easy way to link to the relevant thread. :(

by ayaros

3/25/2026 at 1:04:52 AM

Whoo, has anyone actually got a working Lisa? Or is this emulation?

by zabzonk

3/25/2026 at 11:54:36 AM

There are a lot of working Lisas out there.

by einr

3/25/2026 at 1:08:32 AM

If I recall it's been done on both (emulator and real hardware).

The original version of GEMDOS (the replacement for DOS or CP/M when running on 68k) was in fact developed on the Lisa as a 68k dev machine [also some Motorola VME dev boards I think?) before actual Atari HW was available. So it's a full circle thing.

by cmrdporcupine