http://toastytech.com/guis/ns08.html
NextStep 0.8, '88 vintage.
NextStep 0.8, '88 vintage.
Those were fun times!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS#mediaviewer/File:ST_D...
Looks pretty X-like. It seems GEM itself was licensed from Digital Research but their GEM didn't use X.
Edit: Fixed DEC to DR, as pointed out by reply comment below.
On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions. At 640x480, a VGA display contemporary to NeXTStep could display 16 colors, and at 320x200, 256 colors.
I think I'd characterize it a little differently: I remember games favoring 256-color modes (320x200, ModeX, etc.) and productivity applications favoring higher resolution. At the time, having both high bit depths and high resolution at the same time was asking too much of the hardware.
To put it in perspective, for a while, my desktop PC was an older generation 486/33. When I say 'older generation', what I mainly mean is that it was one of the last machines that lacked a local bus of any kind. This put the video board behind an ISA-bus, which was lucky to sustain 8MB/sec shared across all peripherals. Just looking at the bus, it couldn't update a full 1024x768 desktop at more than 10Hz. (320x200 was well over 100Hz).
But when it came to productivity applications, they were probably more conservative than anything else on the PC platform. Even though I had this great video card and could run Windows 3.1 at high resolutions, I still exited to DOS to run WordPerfect in 80x25 text mode.
I actually recently came across a box of floppies that I used in middle school. Schoolwork that I did in 7th grade, in 1992, was all saved in WordPerfect 5.1 format. Stuff from 8th grade, 1993, was in Ami Pro format. So I'm fairly certain that I didn't start using any productivity software in Windows until about 1993.
The only graphical productivity application I remember using prior to that, under DOS, was Ventura Publisher, which, IIRC, actually used a custom version of the GEM GUI. But I ran that on my 8088 XT-clone in EGA mode.
Regarding software, my family and I went straight over to Windows productivity software with the release of Windows 3.0. The back story behind that was that our first printer (ca. 1986-7) was a Toshiba P321. This was a relatively new, 24-pin printer that was almost completely unsupported by the DOS software that we had. Windows 3.0 solved the support problem by giving us a single, good printer driver that worked for anything that could print through the Windows API. Between that, the protected mode memory manager, and support for 16 color 800x600, Windows was a compelling enough package that we immediately switched over almost entirely in 1990.
I read an awesome piece a while back (and for the life of me I can't remember where) that said if you want to design for the future, estimate what computing power will be available in 10-15 years then buy that for your developers.
In that project I think they spent 186,000 per machine per user on average but they where designing software light years ahead of its time.
The other project wasn't trying to create a product they where trying to capture a sense of what hardware would be on every desk in 10 years and design for that, in effect skating to where the puck will be rather than where it is.
I wish I could remember where I read it :|.