History of the Gem Desktop Environment | Hacker News Reader

History of the Gem Desktop Environment

nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com

76 pointsibobev38 comments

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!

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 :-)

IBM PC "compatibles" and pirated DOS floppy disks are truly underrated. They built the foundation for a generation of software developers.

That would be either the Amstrad PC1512 or the PC1640, I guess.

I had a holiday job/Saturday job at a computer shop that sold these.

I’m surprised to realise I still remember the model numbers and specs.

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 :)

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.

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

Considering its price, the Atari 520ST was a good machine. The most common PC of that era ran an 80286 CPU with MS-DOS. However, in the end, the Atari, Amiga, and Macintosh could not keep up with PC clones, which were innovating much faster. Apple just got lucky and survived to 1997 because of its loyal DTP user base. Then, Microsoft saved it because it didn't want to be perceived as a monopoly.

At the time the Mac launched and for many years after Apple continued to bring in big coin from its Apple II series sales (which was very successful in schools), not the Macintosh. So it wasn't really DTP that was keeping it surviving, at least for the first few years. Obviously that changed by the late 80s.

> a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price

The original Macintosh was launched January 1984 for $2,495.

The original ST was launched June 1985 for $799.

In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.

Tech was changing faster than now in those days, but even so, the ST was a radical machine. You got a lot for the money.

By September 1984 the 512kB "Fat Mac" was launched but it was more expensive: $3,195.

Yes, Commodore's contemporary Amiga was more impressive, with better graphics, better sound, better multitasking, but it was $1,285 the month after the ST. Also, a single-floppy 512kB Amiga was not much fun. (Like a single-floppy 128kB Mac!) As the ST's OS was in ROM, a single-floppy 512kB machine was actually quite usable. For both a Mac and an Amiga, you really wanted twin floppies, or better still, a hard disk.

> In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.

I had friends later marveling I missed out on the Macintosh world of the 1980s, but the pricing was not even remotely an option! So dang expensive for a lower middle class kid.

Exactly so.

I own a Mac Plus, an Atari 1040ST and an Amiga 1200, but I didn't when they were new.

By 1989 I could just afford to buy myself a 2nd hand Acorn Archimedes A310, an 8MHz 32-bit RISC computer with a 20MB hard disk... but it nothing like it existed for any price in 1984 or 1985.

But I was still at school in 1984, and had to be happy with a 48K ZX Spectrum, a black-and-white portable TV as a display, and a single ZX Microdrive for 85kB of random-access storage.

One of the remarkable things about both the ST and the Amiga was that they had optional add-ons that contained Apple ROM chips, and with them, they could natively boot MacOS and thus run real Mac apps. Both machines' hardware capabilities comfortably exceeded the Mac's, so they could easily run Mac stuff and run it well.

Mac software was often fantastically expensive by Atari and Commodore prices, but even so, this was a very attractive option -- and even with the emulator, the result still cost substantially less than an actual Mac.

Of course, longer term, Apple's pricing means that Apple is alive and well and profitable, while Commodore and Atari collapsed decades 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.

1. [https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/ogemdesk.png]

2. [https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/gem256.png]

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.

https://os-projects.eu/sites/default/files/2018-05/freemint....

http://myaes.lutece.net/images/beta7.jpg

Great pictures do you have a resource for more like these?

One of my (partially) GEM apps for Atari ST recently resurfaced in my RSS feed thanks to Disc Master search. It's a fractal viewer that I wrote in 1993 at age 16. It took a fraction of a second for me to remember all the details of the app and how to use it. Good times. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2025/03/14/digging-up-the-pa...

In the Atari ST world GEM is still an existing and maintained thing, open source and somewhat modernized.

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/ (AES ["application environment services"] is the GUI & messaging layer of GEM, sitting along side VDI, the graphics layer)

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.

I remember using a DTP on GEM called Finesse around the same time!

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.

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.

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/viewmax1.html

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.

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.

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.

I did GEM application development on an Olivetti M24 and various Atari ST models.

Cool! I may have used some of your applications on my Atari 1040 ST back in 1988. Which ones did you work on?

I used Gem on https://www.retromobe.com/2016/10/amstrad-pc1512-1986.html?m...

Felt pretty advanced compared to BBC computer!

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).

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

Nice piece -- it's very good on the early history.

It does, however, totally omit much of the later development.

When Caldera released the source code, it also released the unfinished GEM/XM, a multitasking version.

http://www.deltasoft.com/news.htm

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/freegemxm-the-open-source-ver...

Another version was X/GEM on FlexOS, DR's multitasking RTOS line, and at least some forms of UNIX.

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/digitalRese...

FlexOS eventually evolved into IBM 4680 OS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexOS#4680_OS

And that into IBM 4690 OS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System

Later sold as Toshiba 4690 OS.

This supports a GUI, which I think is based on X/GEM, as well as TCP/IP networking, app development in Java, and more. It was sold until about 10 years ago.

I don't think I've ever seen a screenshot.

There have also been interesting later FOSS developments.

On the ST platform, TOS + GEM evolved in multiple directions. Some were proprietary, such as MagiC.

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

A FOSS one became MiNT, which is sometimes called FreeMINT.

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

This became the basis of TOS 4, so Mint is Not TOS was redefined to mean Mint is Now TOS.

There's a complete distro of FreeMINT with the TeraDesk multitasking desktop, called AFROS. It targets a FOSS ST emulator called ARANyM:

https://aranym.github.io/

https://aranym.github.io/afros.html

https://github.com/ragnar76/afros

Some very minimal firmware to emulate just enough of TOS to boot the MINT replacement OS was developed, called EmuTOS.

This eventually grew into a very complete FOSS clone of TOS+GEM, called EmuTOS:

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

It even supports some Amiga hardware now!

There's a 4min demo here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kYr5ftxyTA

EmuTOS went from a stub ROM that just reproduced something analagous to the kernel of MS-DOS to a full graphical OS, using the PC GEM source code that Caldera made GPL.

So there is a lovely full circle here, where the ST version continued for years after Windows killed off the PC version, but then the PC version got open-sourced and was used to revive and modernise the ST version in the 21st century.

There's been a lot more GEM-related development in the last decade or two than you'd expect. This makes me happy.

I dream about mac os 1 and (or) GEM desktop as SDL4 library. Many small project need gui.

Also: <https://guidebookgallery.org/guis/gem>

I'd love to read this but substack is a no-go for me.

Just curious, what are your concerns around substack?

Substack platforms nazis.

What's wrong with Substack? It's just the cool blogging platform of the day, you don't have to engage with paying subscriptions if you don't want.

They are happy to host literal, actual nazis.

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