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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

Related: Atari GEM (1985)

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue60/175_1_GEM_A_N...

GeoWorks was one of the (very small) set of windowing systems we looked at for the Atari ST.

This was only a month after Atari was bought, and the folks from Commodore were running things without consulting us "old Atari" types (establishing trust took a few months). There were no slam dunks; every windowing system had its drawbacks. I remember reading a bunch of documentation and not being impressed by anything commercially available.

GEM came with my first PC-XT, 8086 8MHz (or maybe it was even 8088, not sure), 640KB RAM, 20MB HDD, 5.25" floppy, monochrome display etc. It worked on top of DOS.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)

More competitor than simply related. At least on the PC front.

Isn't competition a kind of relationship? I kind of thought that anyone interested in one contemporary graphical Windows alternative might be interested in another. I would have mentioned Desqview too, but we already had a story about that very recently.

[OT] Lundukes writeup of desqview X https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1...

Was something I aspired to acquire, but never did.

Just running real-mode Win 3.1 in a window was a pretty awesome feat.

That's why I said "simply related" in my comment.

Yeah, GEM from Digital Research had nothing to do with GEOS/GeoWorks, apart from being DOS-based graphical interfaces that attempted to compete with Windows.

> apart from being DOS-based graphical interfaces

Yeah, apart from that. "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" As if someone interested in the history of such interfaces can even put that one into proper context without considering contemporary developments.

Come on.

"Related" can be used two different ways:

[1] This software is related to that software -- as in, they shared code, or a design, or something. PC GEM is related to Atari ST GEM; PC GEOS is related to C64 GEOS.

[2] software A is relevant to software B, and if one is considering A one should also know about B.

I think which is meant here is clear.

So was what I meant by the same word two comments earlier, but others still went out of their way to misread it. Why was that OK but then I have to "come on" for clarifying my original intent? Save your eye-rolls for the people who deserve them.

Yeah, that's fair. Sorry. I replied to the wrong person. My bad.

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