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GEM released under the GPL
acb writes "Remember GEM, Digital Research's Mac-clone GUI, seen on old PCs and Ataris? Well, Caldera have now released the source code under the GPL. Should be interesting, from a retrocomputing point of view.
" Someone fire up my ST. Oh wait-I don't have one.
Lord love a duck!
A couple of years back, someone bet me that you couldn't find GEM on the net. Took me two minutes and I found a couple of GEM related sites. This just kills me.
I mean Windows may be but Thank god DRI didn't win that little desktop war. God, GEM on the desktop
!
Hell yeah... I got GEOS with my Commodore Mouse (more like a brick with buttons). I thought it was amazing that I could have a desktop organizer and calendar program and use a mouse (hey, stuff like that was amazing when I was 8).
Just promise me one thing, let's never resurrect GEOS as a window manager!
Tom Wojciaczyk
GEM was out way before the first MAC. As a matter of fact, the first MACs used GEM. It wasn't until later that Apple developed there own GUI.
GEM was the first true GUI. Xerox laid the path.
It's easy to beat that.
GeOS ran a mouse driven graphical interface with a word processor and various other built in applications on a 64K Commodore 64.
I hope the gdesktop is ported to linux soon. Since Caldera released it, they must have a plan for it to make linux more easy to use. xwindos is a hog and we need more choices. I want a gui on my linux server at work but x kills performance.
My first desktop publishing job was using GEM Ventura on a 286 with a 12" b&W monitor.
I kind of miss Ventura. It was an excellent long document publishing tool. With it's native SGML support I'm surprised it didn't make more of a comeback in the Web world.
Yeah. Cause I love Guru Meditations.
What were they smoking?
I agree with you in that the Mac GUI did everything better, but you had to pay thousands of dolars to get one.
For only $600 my 520ST did everything I needed just fine.
BTW, anyone out there remember Steinberg Pro 24?
At least it worked for more than 6 months at a time (Atari had problems with IC sockets in their early STs).
Jack Tramiel & sons (Atari Corp. owners) called it "Power without the price." That was pure baloney. A 20 meg hard drive with SCSI interface was $700 compared with around $500 for an RLL or MFM drive for a PC, almost no software came with the thing, and the OS crashed as much as Windows (remember the bombs?).
Not only that, but most product announcements from Atari were pure vaporware. In fact, Tramiel invented the form while running Commodore. Don't forget his "Business is war" motto. It's obvious that Jack Tramiel was Bill Gates' mentor.
At least my old 1982-vintage Atari 800 still works.
Are you insane? GEM did not come out before Xerox's original work, which was around in 1979 (when Jobs and Co. saw it). Apple developed their GUI from scratch though....they only actually saw the Xerox system long enough to get the basic idea of windows, icons, etc. But their actual implementation was very different and far more capable. Even tiny things....for example, Xerox had hacked together something to give the impression that it could handle overlapping windows, which is why the Apple people thought it should do this. In fact, the Alto couldn't handle overlapping windows.
The first GUI computer from Apple was the Lisa, in 1983. The LisaOS was a precursor to the Mac OS, and where things like QuickDraw first came about. GEM came out in 1984. Apple never made any machines that used GEM or had anything to do with it.
Forgot...
The GEM-32 never happened because work and personal issues rendered me with no time to work on the project.
g.
There are a fair number of lunatics (including Alan Cox) porting Linux to the Psion 5; IIRC GEM was designed for 640x240 screens, which is what the P5 has.
Or would porting GEM to a Linux-like environment be utterly unimaginable?
Yeah. GeoWorks ran rings around both GEM and Windows on my old XT clone with 640K RAM. GeoWorks was much faster and looked even better than either GEM or Windows.
So I guess W2K must be 1000 times more powerful than GEM ... not :-)
Rich.
Same here!
The switch from Atari (TT 68030 32MHz 8Mb RAM)
to my first PC was the reason I switched to
Linux. I hated Win3.11 and Win95 was not much
better. I already had MiNT (Mint is Not Tos,
a UNIX-like preemptive multitaskking environment)
on my Atari with TeX, Ghostscript etc...
Windows was a big step backwards. I got so
fed up with it that I switched to Linux about
3 months later.
Now where's Calamus DTP for Linux? That's one I
REALLY miss.
Windows 3.0 didn't exist when GEM came out; it was Windows
1.0. And while GEM ran quite well on my 8086, Windows
was intolerably slow. And to make things worse, the original
Windows couldn't even do overlapping windows, only tiled.
Of course, an even bigger joke in the "windows" competition
was IBM's TopView.
Try http://users.leading.net/~kellis/, http://dhs.atari.org/, www.milan-computer.de and check some of the links at http://atari.nvg.org/launchpad.
Dude man, ST's were cool. GEM was cool. I thought it was the bes of both worlds - not to MAC'y and not too PCish - just the right blend. I can't wait to front end my linux box with GEM, and see how it can be grown. You gotta love a WM system that fits on a pair of 128Kb ROM chips... Think of the po ssibilited for embeded computers with Linux and a small GEM front end...
Geos is actually alive and fairly well, at New Deal (www.newdealinc.com), and includes a POP E-mail client and a web browser as well as an adequate word processor, etc. You can even make the GUI look like Windows 95, if you want.
No thanks, Windows 95 is ugly as hell.
So will this thing boot up on DOSEMU? (Yeah yeah, I'm going to try it for myself, but I figger if someone's already tried it and it bombed, that'll save me a couple hours of dicking around with it...)
When I started a multimedia company, Quark was in version 1.x
I looked at the things Quark under Mac could do, then what Ventura under GEM could do on our 286.
Ventura blew away Quark. Then I got Artline 2.0 which was much better than Illustrator.
Unfortunatly, better marketing won....
As far as I know, GEOS for the 65xx is still closed source and still being sold. You probably have a copy of an annotated disassembly of the kernel.
;-) There is work on a print spooler and mountable FAT partitions.
For those of you that are interested, GEOS for the Commodore 64/128 has come a long way. With sufficient memory, you can now task-switch just like Microsoft Windows
for release as GPL
Wordstar, dBaseIII, Paradox, Sprint (I would actually use this), Turbo Prolog (it may still be around), WordPerfect DOS (still the best version),
El-Fish as an X root window, InfoSelect (although I duplicated it with php/Postgres), Instant Artist (a terrific DTP prog by Autodesk).
Anything else?
TOS in ROM... remember, the Amiga's kickstart was also in ROM, & had to be upgraded with the OS. That was an extra $40 or so, but you could do it yourself.
As for the older Macs, someone recently gave me a working SE. I'm putting it to work as a Bolo 'bot.
--Dirt Road
Things like Street Atlas USA, and that thing with all the back issues of trade magazines on a CDROM. Why should these things be tied to crappy OS?
Or at least they could publish the data formats. Then we could write our own. Probably do a better job of it, too.
Amiga people tend to use the 680x0 MMU on their accelerator cards to "softkick" these days - usually, they just copy their own rom into Fast (i.e. 32-bit) RAM, but it is possible to use a different kickstart version. The best amiga ever made, the A3000, loaded the kickstart off HD anyway , and the A1000 loaded it off floppy.
Since the AmigaOS doesn't use the MMU, this is safe.
In fact, this days, if you have a 68040, 68060, or PPC accelerator, you pretty much HAVE to softkick to get optimum performance out of your machine ( that way, the entire OS is in 32-bit RAM on your accelerator card)
Actually, my last amiga was a 68060 50 MHz + 233MHz PPC 604e + 128 MByte RAM + 4 GByte HD + Permedia 2 GFX card. It rocked.
The next lot of accel cards coming out for the "classic" amiga, as opposed to the "NG" Amiga being developed by Gateway, are PPC G3's, emulating the 68060 in software.
If nothing else, they'd make a good LinuxPPC platform ( all the Amiga HW is well-documented + understood)
I only sold my amiga recently, and got a 400MHz PC running linux, but only because I had to have PC-compatibility for University, and couldn't afford to have both. Linux is still clunkier in some areas than AmigaOS - BeOS comes closest to AmigaOS ( some would say "rips off"), but unfortunately, neither BeOS nor AmigaOS are open source, although I suspect Gateway will release the "classic" amiga source to haage+partner when they finish their AmigaNG
check out
www.cucug.org/aminew.html
www.escena.de
www.phase5.de
www.haage-partner.com
An excellent article. I thought he had died in a small-plane
accident, but the news release about his death was fairly
vague. It's too bad he didn't live to see the Linux revolution.
Unlike Gates, he had actual technical talents. But he didn't
have the same marketing abilities, nor the huge amounts of
money that MS's early DOS monopoly provided.
The IBM RT is discontinued, what is at stake by releasing source/specs to it now (15 years later)?
PC/GEOS, now NewDeal Office, can use either GeoWorks' Motif(R) GUI or the "Industry Standard UI" (I know, standard makes me want to wretch too) which is essentially Win9x's GUI.
:)
The icons for representing files are like OS/2 2.0's, however.
Anyway, IBM once-upon-a-time even created an OS/2 PM GUI for running on GEOS. I can't get it to run under PC/GEOS 3.0 (the kernel and software NewDeal is based on), but it works under 2.5.
Anyway, it's definately worth a read.
Oh, and the point you missed is this:
*GEOS is now targeted toward newbies and schools on OLD hardware, and having the same interface as windoze makes these users (a) feel like they're using something "standard" (b) feel comfortable with windoze machines (c) stop using that icky Motif GUI. It's ugly. Windoze is ugly, but GEOS's Motif is uglier
Kickstart was not originally in ROM. On the family computer, which was an Amiga 1000, you had to put in the kickstart disk before the workbench/game disk. The only thing in ROM was that stupid-looking hand and the code to load the kickstart image.
Loading Kickstart from disk was a pain, but it was a good idea on Commodore's part, at least at first. KS 1.0 was pretty much unusable, from what my dad tells me. KS 1.1 / WB 1.1 were pretty buggy, I know that from experience. Commodore didn't really get it together until 1.2.
We eventually upgraded our Amigas (two 1000's) with kickstart ROM boards (which typically cost about $50-$80 or so, AFAIK). This was when KS 2.04 came out, which was too large for the Amiga 1000's kickstart memory area (which was 256K). The kickstart boards typically had two sockets, so you could switch versions by holding down control-amiga-amiga for 10 seconds or so.
I think putting TOS in ROM is slightly more akin to stuffing Workbench into that kickstart ROM.
Plus, C= finally did get their act together; KS1.2 was "current" for a *long* time, and the only real difference between 1.2 and 1.3 that I remember is 1.3 had better HD autoboot support. I think most of the KS1.2 bugs (if any) were worked around by Workbench's setpatch command.
On my right sits a Lisa, purchased used in '84, at astronomical cost (more than my car at the time). At my right sits a Mac 128k (1st mac), bought not much later for about $3,500.
Oddly enough, neither seems to be running GEM... And as far as Xerox goes... You'd better go and research before you post if you're going to make things up!
Try a HP 200lx. It *IS* a videotape-sized DOS palmtop with CGA support, (and hercules emulation, if you use a TSR included in the ROM,) SIR/FIR support, (IRDA limited to printers, unless someone comes up with better drivers,) and a 186 processor (not quite a 286, but few programs seem to mind) that runs standard mode Windoze 3.1 just fine. DOS GEM would be a great O/S for this machine, and far better than Windoze CE.
I think people see this icon with gates
looking like a cyborg, I think this should be turned
around.. Now we are the cyborg's, but cyborgs with
individualist minds, we collect any kind of technology that is willing to
give up its soul, more humanist programmer-types than arrogant in our own objectives,
then we take this technology extract the parts that give it its individuality and
we make our own more individualized.. Look the programs
can't feel.. They don't scream "Help Help I'm being assimilated!!"
Maybe GEM will help in this effort to define or rather undo the definition of what GPL is, and what linux as well (beit far from a purist statement far from what Richard Stallman would condone). Its one more piece of software
not being sold.. Yeah!!
No, GEMDOS is *not* based on CP/M. The original
AES and VDI was developed on Apple Lisas running CP/M, but the GEMDOS in the ST is a pure DOS-clone.
IIRC Hasbro owns TOS today, but why care about that? Replacements for everything in TOS (GEMDOS, VDI, AES) exists, some of them was GPLed long time ago. These are also much more modern, with true preemptive multitasking, VFAT/minixfs/ext2fs/nfs, networking (sockets), TrueType/PS/Speedo font-support... I can't see why anyone should bother with the original GEM, atleast not the PC-version which was seriously crippled compared to the ST-version.
in the beginning was the bit, and it was 0...
I'm still using my Atari ST for arranging midi and recording music.
:P
I could run
Linux/m68k
port-atari from NetBSD
MiNT
but what I really like still using Atari ST for is perfected midi support and Cubase that works.
I use Calamus for everything else
Rosegarden runs under X Window System using OSS.
Interesting how almost all the ST talk here relates to way back...
:)
If I was at home reading this, it'd be on my Atari Falcon. Yep, next in the ST range - with SVGA, SCSI, DSP, etc. and loads of new s/ware too.
And it's (usually) running an OS called MagiC. Fast, stable, pre-emptive multi-tasking, better than X or Windoze in some respects, _and_ it's fully backward-compatible with GEM. Good, huh?
In short, the ST platform's still alive and kickin', TVM! Just thought you'd all like to know
Gidds/
My site contains screenshots of PC GEM (as opposed to Atari GEM).
Rosanne runs on a Z80. Admittedly a 16MHz Z80 with
1Mb, whereas GEM runs on an 8MHz XT with 512k.
The Atari got a webbrowser for their GEM.
Its called CAB - Crystal-something-Browser.
I managed to run it on an Atari emulator once,
it looked pretty good though kinda slow and
tend to crash.. but from the reports I read
about it in Atari users site's, the crashes
and slow-speed was probebly because of the
emulator. I think that this thing is
free-source.. so it might be possible to port
it to the DOS GEM. Just go to Yahoo! and look
for the "Atari" section under Computers.
-WinterKnight (Or Botton)
*sigh* I hand you guys a perfectly good description and you turn around and hose it. Jeeze. :)
:)
Yes, GEM would be good for some kind of VERY thin client box. Would be kind of interesting to combine an updated GEM with a single disk Linux distribution. Would be great for doing special diag or management work from a single bootable disk. Hmm...
Gene Buckle
The guy who fought to get GEM GPL'd.
geneb@deltasoft.com
Porting GEM to a Linux-like environment has been done several times, first by Atari when they released MultiTOS. There are also two free AES'es out there (XaAES, oAESis) that should be rather easy to port to Linux. In fact, some swedes are writing a AES and a VDI for Linux right now. I can't remember the URL off-hand, but try searching for oAESis or oVDIsis, or look for a link at http://atari.nvg.org/launchpad/.
There's also some info about N.AES at http://atari.nvg.org/n.aes/.
Jo Even Skarstein
Milan Computer (http://www.milan-computer.com) of Germany own TOS. They currently make Atari ST clones that use '040 or '060, PCI, IDE, etc.
Because 'this guy' kicked and screamed to get it released after Caldera closed their European Development Center and all hope of ever seeing a new commercial release of GEM dried up. I've been sitting on the GEM sources for nearly three years waiting for this to happen. I've got the ViewMAX code set for release as well, but I need to finish putting the GPL notices in.
Gene Buckle
geneb@deltasoft.com
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I remember you from the OpenDos mailing list on DJ Delorie's server. For me, those were the days. Oh the heady excitement, a free(ish) open source dos! Still got od701 on a cdrom.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Didn't they change the name back to DR-DOS? I seem to recall that they decided they wanted the brand recognition.
My first computer was a CPC 464, and I think I already had the 6128 by the time, but gee, wasn't the 1512 a great computer ;))))
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
--
--
=8^
Ik own both an Atari ST and an Amiga 1000. both are gems of my collection. (Although I have always been more of an Amiga fan),
(the old RatBastard runs for cover whilst slipping on his fireproof underpants).... :)
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
A friend of mine used to run GEOS (Geoworks? I can't remember the name...) on his 286 because it didn't have enough RAM to run Windows 3.1 properly. It was very cool; much nicer appearance and integration than Windows, and it ran fast with 1 MB RAM.
TedC
I'd bet Alan has something else in his mind. Atleast there's a merge of the bogl library (Ben Pfaff's simple graphics library created for the graphical Debian installer) and mini-x (sic) floating around at ftp.uk.linux.org. Mini-x is the windowing system used on Minix. Some of his comments in the diary talk about this too.
Until this thread, I'd felt old twice in my life:
:(
1) I used a "buy pizza or records" example in an econ help room. I paused, then asked, "you've probably never seen a record, have you?" ANd got a strange look, and "Just how old *are* you?"
2) I passed afamily moving in with two teenage sweet young things, and my instinctive reaction was, "I wonder if they baby sit?"
Now, even the folks that want to dig back farther (the Atari 800) are talking about machines after my time
What makes me wistful are the old machines you could build, or build copies of. Apples before they fixed the purple text (rev 7). ANything wire-wrapped. HUngering for that 16k memory kit, with no idea what you'd do with it. Jealousy of those rich folks who could afford floppy drives.
But most of all, you could really understand the entire system, rather than pieces of it.
*sigh*
Hardly. It was just properly engineered for it's target: cheap and fast. There were certainly things that it could have done better. However, most of those were of less general purpose use. It got the job done and the fact that it could be burned into ROM was quite handy.
No system disks to currupt & no need to boot a system disk that might have a virus on it.
The system to really bash the ST with would be the Amiga. At least it was in the same price universe.
Sitting down in front of a Mac or PC didn't make me wish I had gotten something else, sitting down in front of an Amiga did.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Pester some ST programmer for one. GEM browsers certainly do exist.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just wrap the VDI around X or SvgaLib or whatever graphics primitives you want. GEM is quite modular actually. You'll also have to deal with DOS level services of course.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...and another thing: GEM/VDI is quite capable of dealing with modern resolutions and colordepths even if the hardware it originally ran on did not.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You know what's sad?
:^)
1. Geos for the PC is still around--I saw Freedom Desktop recently uns great on little memory, has a full suite of applications...
2. Geos for the PC/PDAs uses Motif.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Erm...I suppose that's why Apple sued DR for using the smiley, a direct copy from the MacOS.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I kept hearing people talk about it, and ideas floating around. Someone asked me for some webspace for it, I slaped the pages together, and stuck them up.
Unfortunately, I personally don't want to lead any of these projects, I only offered the site space, and some server side stuff (mailing list setup/mantainance, etc...). And, so far only about a dozen people have showed any interest, so there isn't much to do or talk about yet. If anyone wants to work on it, let me know, I'd be happy to give ya some space, or just the list of names I have so far....
I remember Instant Artist, one of the few DOS programmes that would handle PostScript correctly, and damn was it easy to use. But I believe Autodesk ditched it and some other company took it and released it as Print Artist for Windoze, and that's what it is being sold as now.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Here's the $64K question: could this be easily adapted to be an XWindows alternative for low-end systems? If GTK were ported to it, you could probably get most of the apps you want.
Of course, I know SO little about GEM it's pathetic. Can someone more knowledgable comment?
-- Slashdot sucks.
AFAIK, TOS is a version of CP/M 68k (the 68000 port of CP/M), licensed from DRI and rebadged to exalt then Atari CEO Jack Tramiel's ego. Therefore large chunks of it would belong to Caldera.
Mind you, Caldera aren't as liberal with CP/M and variants as they are with GEM, as CP/M still may have market value (as a low-end embedded micro-OS).
my very first pc was a cheapo 8086 Amstrad with (only) dual 360k floppies.
:-)
It took 4 floppies to boot into the GEM environment (which was essentially useless anyway without a hard drive).
I quickly learned about batch files, which enabled me to get rid of the prompts to load the final 3 diskettes. (you mean I don't HAVE to load GEM?).
The 3 disk GEM exercise was nothing to trying to compile a QuickBasic program for my first programming course. (insert disk 2, remove, insert disk 3, removed, insert disk 6, removed, insert disk 9, remove, insert disk 1, after 5 minutes of swapping diskettes.....hello world!).
And I thought I'd heard the last of GEM....
When billg claims "GEM is dead", we'll know it's back
While i never ran geoworks, i think GEM has a whole lot to offer. I remember running GEM & Ventura on an 8086 machine! I had a VERY full fledged desktop Publishing system! Not wordprocessing, that was FAST, on an 8086 machine! To even come close to that functionality now, i need a pentium class machine, >32MB of Ram, and several Gigs of hard drive space! Have we really made progress?
Hear! Hear! I also used Ventura 1.0! I justrecently bought, at a used SW store the, the Ventura 3.0, the last version under GEM for DOS!
zI think it still has the most bang for the buck!!!
What happened to program develoment! Shouldn't we have had more functionality/performance? did windows and M$ do this to us?
FOr all the advantages that we now have, i can't help but kind of wonder if things might have been different if GEM had prevailed instead of Windows? When GEM emerged, as someone else mentioned as a way to have a Mac environment on the PC for those of us who couldn't afford a Mac, it was pretty amazing. Granted there were few applications but the ones that were there, coupled with Ventura, all this running on a 8086 machine!
I guess i'm getting nostalgic, a sure sign of getting old, but i can't help but fondly look back to that time when memory was expensive and programs, seemingly, had to be better crafted. Wouldn't it be nice to be running the types of applicatiosn we have now, with the performance that was available then?
My 2 cents, FWIW!
Russ
Actually, when i was at TI, since we were an early GEm/Ventura adopter, i had received a beta copy of GEM that did pseudo-multitasking. Albeit it was actually more of a context-switching system, that ran under regular MS-DOS.
FYI
Russ
No. No no no.
Apple's Macintosh GUI was based on the GUI they developed for the Lisa. The Lisa was released in January 1983, and showed a much stronger Xerox PARC influence than the Mac GUI did (it didn't feel like it was "hiding" the computer from you the way the Mac Finder did, looked more Smalltalk-ish, and interestingly, did cooperative multitasking, something the Mac didn't get for several years after its release). The Macintosh was released a year later in January 1984.
In no way were either the Lisa or the Mac interfaces a derivative of GEM, whose first version was released in March 1985; the first retail PC version wasn't out until September of that year. In fact, Apple sued Digital Research for copying the Macintosh interface, which is why later versions of the GEM Desktop were "downgraded" to have fixed windows and lost the trashcan icon. (This showed up in later versions as the "ViewMax" shell in DR-DOS 5 and 6.)
Sources for this information, with dates, are pretty easy to find. The GEM information comes from the "gemnotes.txt" file available on the site the source code is at; the Lisa information comes from apple-history.com.
Yup
Get Sun to release NeWS! Now that would be a great thing to have. It would be nice to get both the original Gosling code and the somewhat broken version which had X11 compatability.
Best example is that they detected double clicks by waiting until the time has passed before sending a "single click" or a "double click" event to the application. This of course meant the system had a built-in delay in responding to any clicks. As an exercise to the reader, try to figure out a better interface (you have 12 seconds to answer).
I wonder, why is GEM being released from this guy first and not from Caldera themselves? I know Caldera planned on releaseing GEM quite some time ago, but GPL was certainly not something I'd expected.
On another note, does anyone know about GEM-32 (or whatever the proper name for it is)? I remember reading about it on the OpenDOS mailling lists, but that was a while back. Are there still plans to develop such a product?
And please tell me there is a lightweight web browser available. I mean, an operating system just isn't complete without one!
A/UX (apple's 68k un*x)... at the very least, having that code out there to look at would be a great benefit to all the maclinux/macbsd coders out there...
----- when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro -- Hunter S. Thompson
Hehe. I see the trashcan has been named Amiga. I guess after all these years some ST owners can still be mad. I'd kind of picture it like this now. The Amiga and the ST would be like two old men sitting on the front porch fighting over a checker game.
Well at least the ST did the way a computer should, in the market place. Not hung up by it's own parent company and strangled due mis-management and stupidity.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I know a guy with i think 64MB of ram in his c64
and a couple of gb's of disk space.
ww2.southwind.net/~natedac is his page iirc.
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
I still use it on my Pentium notebook. It's small, fast, sophisticated (it's multithreaded, object-oriented, has virtual memory, long filenames, is compact, you name it) and does exactly what I want it to. It comes with an excellent DTP package supporting outline fonts (rotatable and scalable), bitmap graphics (ditto), vector graphics (ditto), text frames (ditto), paragraph styling, tight wrapping of text around objects, and is blazingly fast... the entire program's 80kB. That's good programming. And this all runs in real mode, no 32-bit code in sight. I've never seen it use more than 4MB of memory, ever...
Go to New Deal's home page for screenshots and a shareware downloadable version (fully working, but you only get one app --- the awsome DTP package mentioned above).
If you want to try it out without copying 300kB of data onto each of five floppies, which the original GEM installer requires, you can try my highly unofficial installer package which you can find at my GEM page.
This currently has a silly little bug which prevents it from running of MSDOS machines, only DRDOS ones (it's that = vs == thing in the batch language), which I will fix ASAP.
You may also find the source interesting if you like hairy batch files.
GEM is scarily fast on my P90...
Somewhereabouts I still have an annotated source listing of GEOS, a similar windowing system on the Commodore 64. Now, those were the days; writing apps in assembler and working out how to overlay them so you could fit everything in 38k. I never bought the mouse, though; I used the joystick like most users.
Ladbrokes, the bookmakers in the UK, used to use Vic 20's for settling bets; we still have a few gathering dust in some shops. The new system works on windows. This is progress? If the Vic had developed at the same rate as PC's have, we'd all have 100MHz 6502's with maybe half a meg of RAM, and that'd still be enough...
The Palm's Dragonball processors are in the 68020 family. The Atari STs used its brothers, so a Palm port of GEM can probably be done. However, the rest of the hardware design was probably very different, so how hard this would be may depend on how well the code is organized on the device driver front.
And most existing GEM apps would be a bit awkward in 160x160. But that never stopped anyone.
And unlike the Linux distro for the Palm, GEM should be small enough to fit on a stock Palm Professional, to say nothing of the later models.
GEM is cross-platform. GEM runs fine on a 286 with 512K RAM, not to mention a plain old 68000.
Hey! I know what would be great: a DOS palmtop with Hercules graphics support and IrDA running the DOS GEM version of Ventura Publisher. You could turn it into a handheld print shop and beam PostScript output to IR-capable printers and PCs.
I've not ever seen a GEMwm nor GEM theme. As far as I can tell, it's one of the few popular GUI environments that have never been cloned under a wm.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Who holds the copyright to TOS these days? JTS, Hasbro? It would be great if that was freed too.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
I use to play civilization on my fathers old ST ;-). And it only had 2 megabytes of ram. It always worked.
I still from time to time play ST Civ on my Linux box, running STonX, the ST emulator. Civ runs perfectly.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Or GEM is 796x faster than W2K since it has that much less code. ;-)
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Is Defender of the Crown the one they also had for the Amiga with the Gorgous Graphics.
I remember the scene with the Knight and Lady siloweted(spelling) in front of the fireplace...for the time, some of the best computer graphics I had ever seen!
James Ray Kenney mailto:jrkenney@swbell.net
Gary Kildall would approve.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Now, I don't care one way or another about GEM, but maybe this is the start of companies releasing old, obsolete source code into the world, so that it isn't lost.
Once a piece of software clearly has no commercial future, the source should be given away, be it public domain, GPL, BSD license, whatever.
It's just wasteful how much code will be lost, never to see the light of day.
Damn. this actually brought a tear to my eye.. :)
:-)
My first computer was an Atari ST. Oh how I loved it. I should never have sold it..
I remember the day my dad bought it to me.. it had only a single sided disk drive (one of ataris mistakes) and no games whatsoever. Only a demo of a bouncing 3D ball.
But! It came with a programminglanguage.
Many evenings were spent drawing circles and boxes.
Finally I got some games.. Microprose Soccer was my favourite. Anyone remember Defender of the Crown?
aaahh.. those were the days
vr
Yes it did. And it was great! :-) :'-)
Well.. it may not have been that good, but I'd like to rember it that way..
"Just promise me one thing, let's never resurrect GEOS as a window manager!"
:-)
:-)
IIRC it was ported to the PC...
In fact, if the oldies - desQview and GEOS too - are released as GPL, there would be a certain peer pressure so that Micros~1 might feel compelled to release Windows 3.1 in the same manner.
(As if...)
Darn Atari STs. Get a real computer! Get an Amiga 500! :-)
The IC socket problem was nothing a quick drop onto a hard surface wouldn't fix :-) A friend of mine picked up an old MegaST a few months back, which promptly died. The guy who sold it to him told him to do the ever-reliable "drop it to reseat the chips" trick, and it's worked just fine ever since.
I liked my old ST, but I still find it difficult to believe that I paid 100 quid back in 1987 or so to get it upgraded from 512K to 1Mb and thought I was getting a deal at the time.
Don't get me wrong. Not only did I love my Atari 1040ST, I even still have it! But it only took me a year and a half to realize what a truly feeble rip-off of the Mac GEM was. I mean, come on. It combined the most trivial parts of the Mac's GUI with the most annoying aspects of MS-DOS (I know, it's really CP/M that's to blame for that). I could go on for hours about the ways Finder+MacOS was/is better than GEM+CP/M.
The single greatest thing about the Atari ST was that it could boot in 1 second, and that has nothing to do with GEM. In fact, most of what made the ST great was its hardware, and had nothing to do with GEM. GEM was never more than a third-rate GUI.
As near as I can tell, there's not one single thing in GEM that even Macs of the same time didn't do better, albeit a little slower (they were clocked at 7.1 MHz, vs. 8 MHz). Let's not even get started talking about X-Windows. Even (shudder) Windows 3.0 was better in many ways (worse in others).
Yes, I loved my Atari ST. But I am truly glad that I saw the light and never have to go back to GEM again.
As far as I know, nothing you said is true. If you can provide references to back up your statements, I might believe you. Frankly, though, I doubt you can substantiate anything you said.
The Mac Classic (c1989) had MacOS in ROM, too, 6.0.1 IIRC. Not that I ever tried to use it, but it's cute that it was in there.
Putting TOS in ROM was an incredibly STUPID move on Atari's part. It meant that I had to live with all the bugs of TOS 1.0 for YEARS (can you say "40 folder limit"?) while MacOS updates came along every few months. When a newer OS finally did come out, it cost $100 and needed factory authorized installation!
For the same money, the Amiga was a MUCH better computer. It's the machine that the ST should have been.
Finally, when I got my 1040ST, I paid around $1500 for a system with two floppies and a color monitor. For the same price, I probably could have found a used Mac Plus (they were $2500 new). At the time, I thought I was getting a great deal. I was wrong. A computer is only as good as the software you can run on it, and the ST never had software as good as what you could get on the Mac. I should know, I used both.
Much as I wanted my ST to be a beautiful swan, it was never anything but an ugly duckling.
No! I can't! I left you for a reason! I'm in a new relationship now and I'm very happy. She's GPLed also and... I know... No, I had a good time with you... No! You're not ugly! It's just... I thought you were dead! I waited! Long, bitter years! I learned German just to be able to run more software for you! Damn you! I went to hell and back defending you from those Commodore Zealots and what did you do for me??? Nothing! Nothing!
So finally, I had to move on. Everything was great. And now... (sobs) ...now you've come back here begging me to take you back. Claiming you're GPLed... Get out! No, please... (sobs) ...please, leave. (breaks down crying)
RinkRat
You ask whether Windows and M$ did this; 'fraid so. That's what the fuss is about. Call it intellectual cancer, maybe?
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
The Amiga 1000 was, too. I thought both were good; I wasn't a screaming brat partisan. Btw, the Amiga was Latin-1 compatible, 'way back in early 1986! I wondered why my dealer recommended the printer they did (a Seikosha MP-1300AI, similar to an Epson JX-80, iirc). It had the Latin-1 char. set, back in 1986! Think I'll keep it for a second Linux printer. Interesting beast; downloadable char set (but no software to do that).
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
I cut my teeth on a one-of-kind all-discrete machine built with germanium PNP transistors in TO-5 cans. It had a 19-bit word length, was programmed in absolute base-32 (duotricenary), had 4K of core (not enough), and backup program storage was head-per-track mag. drum. Had no OS at all. Console typewriter was a Flexowriter (before Teletypes became commonplace). Had a maint. console that was a hacker's paradise: Every FF in the machine (except for the mem. address reg.) had its own lighted pushbutton. Floor space was maybe 400 sq. ft.
Next door was a Philco 2000, which had a rather-disgusting instruction set; 48-bit words.
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
I wish this had happened a year or more ago. I spent a whole summer trying to write an interface to a UV-vis spectrophotometer that's native platform was GEM...
On another note, none of this would have been necessary if Perkin Elmer had released their old crappy source code in the first place anyway.
Alas, when they stopped supporting the Lambda6 the software, docs, specs, and everything were lost in a corporate downsizing...
Re: Tracker programs.. have you played with Voodootracker under Gnome/GTK? Seems pretty nice so far.. (I haven't tested it heavily yet).
:) to work properly under Wine..
:) However, an SMIDI dumper and a decent patch librarian would be nice..
Find linked from Freshmeat, I think.. there are a few midi sequencers too, including a rudimentary midi+audio one in a Cubase stylee, called Jazz..
http://www.jazzware.com/
Until we get some kind of unified audio and midi architecture (with routing a la OMS etc), this kind of thing will always be tricky, mind you.
Personally, I use DAP as a sample ed under leenux right now, and Terminator-X is lot of fun. Do you know of an SMIDI dumper so I can do digital dumps down to my lil Akai sampler?
Considering trying out Freebirth.. I don't think I could rig Rebirth 2.xx (which I love to death- why don't the props look at a linux port?
Anyway, I prefer using the sequencer on my mc505 to drive everything- no sync probs there
Ok, now is DR. DOS GPL'd? That would be cool have DR. DOS running and have GEM running w/ it. =P Wonder how fast it would run on my 233....
"The pen is mighter than the sword... But what if you can't write?"
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
DR. Dos is now known as Open Dos by Caldera. DR. Dos was created by Digital Research (DR) backing the mid/late 80's. I used to run it along time ago.. It was wierd..
"The pen is mighter than the sword... But what if you can't write?"
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Very nice Caldera! I like you!
I had one of those too! The Amstrad 1640 with EGA. :-(
It's still alive to, but the harddrive is dead...
Hey! I still have my Ventura 1.0 floppies! And the 12lb book that explained how to use it.
The future is looking bright.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I have an ST 4Meg with the following: - 2 monitors, one color the other hi-res Mono - Switch for changing monitors - Mouse - Keyboard - Externel SCSI hardrive 10 or 20Mb - Software, books, etc. You pay the shipping costs and it's yours absolutely free (AS IS). It is in full working order. Due to the age of the software diskettes, I don't know if all of them work or not. You would be on your own to salvage what you can. I would prefer that this go to 68000 Linux developer, collector, or Atari Enthusiast. I also have an Atari 800XL with 2 Atari Floppy drives and one Black Indus GT drive (remember those beauties?. Cables, books, software, cartridges, etc. Serious inquiries only please: (Disclaimer: Again, AS IS condition; unknown if all devices and software diskettes are in working order.) inquiries to be sent to: stottm@home.com
I know there's a GEM theme out there for WindowBlinds, a Win32 theme manager.
hehe...
didn't that game also feature FPJ (first-person jousting?)
I wonder how long it'll be before someone borrows bits of this for an X11 window manager, complete with buzzy bee mouse pointer instead of X11's stopwatch, and bombs on the screen when something segfaults.
Mind you, it's probably been done. I wouldn't be surprised if there are GEM themes for Enlightenment, Gnome and KDE out there.
ST's are pretty much the bomb diggity. :-)
I used them in high school as MIDI workstations with Kawai K4's and Notator. I wish I could find a MIDI/notation program a good as Notator, thought. I have found it hard to learn anything else. Especailly since there are virtually NO MIDI composition programs for Linux. Are there any for BeOS? I might just have to buy myself a cheap Mac to run maybe Finale and a Tracker program. Ahh, well.
-- A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
You actually get STonX to work?
I got this dual-processor box (300MHz each) and it runs slow as hell.
---------------------------------
F.J.J. van Heusden
Mobile: +31-6-22390057
e-mail: fjjvh@wxs.nl
---------------------------------
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
I though GEM was quite cool actually. For a start it ran on an 8086.....can anything else beat this?
You could spill anything on that keyboard and it you could not even bother wiping it up. It still would work. Of course you couldn't type very fast.
IBM said that there wouldn't be any new releases of OS/2 (client?) So why don't they open source it before it gets old and crusty.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Actually, I think GEM would fall under the control of the "thin-clients" division, which is going to use it as a GUI for DR-DOS, probably in some sort of embedded internet device.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
GEOS is still around and is still sold, but it has evolved quite a bit. The New Deal OS is based on GEOS and runs on IBM compatible PCs, even old 286s.
You can read about it here:
http://www.altos.org.uk/newdeal/index.html
or go straight to the owners here:
http://www.newdealinc.com/
GEOS is still around and is still sold, but it has evolved quite a bit. The New Deal OS is based on GEOS and runs on IBM compatible PCs, even old 286s.
You can read about it here:
http://www.altos.org.uk/newdeal/index.html
or go straight to the owners here:
http://www.newdealinc.com/
The atari was much better that other computers back then. I had a built-in os, nice bombs to show you that somthing had exploted and a nice soundcard. That was before "The Blue Screen of Death", soundblaster and other modern stuff...
;-). And it only had 2 megabytes of ram. It always worked. There were always a OS to boot, always some (mostly german) public domain programs and games to play. And the floppy drive in the Atari ST was much faster than those in the Amiga 500 :-)
I use to play civilization on my fathers old ST
Wow, this both brings back memories and shows my age. GEM was the official windowing environment for the Flexible Composites Center program at LTV Aircraft Products in the late 80's. (FCC was an automated plant to build parts for the B2 - it died when the B-2 (called ADP-101 as a black project) came in WAY over budget.
/tmp/Earth\ Day*
GEM was selected over Windows, which for those of you too young to know, wasn't even available as a separate product at that time - MS only created Windows so that they could sell PC versions of Excel, which was originally a Mac-only program. In those days (pre Windows 3.0), Windows came bundled with Word for Windows and Excel, which created the interesting problem of having a Windows install step on the existing one when you added another product at a later date...
GEM and it's application suite was much faster and more usable than the MS stuff. While GEM was no Mac, it worked reasonably well. I probably still have floppies somewhere with the network design for the never-built FCC in GemDraw. As I recall, we were trying to get other software vendors to write programs to run in GEM (proj. mgt., etc.) It ran fine on the 286's especially the "fast" 20 MHz ones, and was far faster on the short-lived 40 MHz 286s than on the first 386's, which I think were 16-20 MHz. EGA was the order of the day for graphics and we had an extravagant hundreds of machines with EGA cards! For those that are wondering, it's pretty weak compared to today's windowing systems/WMs - I doubt there's much code there that would be valuable except for embedded systems.
Shifting gears, as for GEOS, I think putting a (usable!) graphical user interface on a Commodore 64 has got to be one of the greatest hacks of all time. It wasn't real fast, but worked well - I wrote my senior papers in college and all my letters an resumes for my job search in GEOwrite. I had the cheesy mouse that pretended to be a joystick - this was seriously inferior to the later Commodore mouse that actually worked like a mouse in GEOS and some other later C64 software.
kill -9 "Earth Day"
rm -rf
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
My friend maintains a site for "saved" obsolete code here:
http://www.capitalresearch.org/fw/fw-1096.html
and is collecting more.
He calls is "AtticWare" (for obvious reasons). If anyone has stuff or ideas, you should check out the url.
ahhh, that was pretty funny . . . capital research were the people who funded some anti free software rant a week or so back.
I was trying to find some way to fund the AtticWare project from them tho . . .
anyway, correct URL is
http://morus.merriweb.com.au/AtticWare.html
I loved my Atari ST and ran it for years. Of course I had tricked it out with a CLI and other sorts of goodies (NeoDesk, UIS III, etc.) and it was a speedy little machine. Between my Atari ST and beginning with Linux I ran WIN95 for two month: Going from the ST to WIN95 was a big step down in terms of reliability and performance.
.gif on my WindowMaker Desktop in honor and rememberance of my beloved ST.)
Linux is a big step up *cheer* and has made this Atari user love his hobby again (I still post an Atari
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I used to run GEM on a 10 MHz 286 with 1 MB of RAM! (Remember the IBM PS/2 Model 50?) I could make a boot floppy (3.5 in / 1.44 MB) with the complete graphical shell on it... Then I could mess with a HD -- move subdirectories, hidden files, etc. It was easier than DOS, and many times it was faster. Try doing that with windows!
Now, what about GEMwrite, GEMdraw, and their relatives? I remember a spreadsheet/graphing program called MicroGrafx (spelling?) It was straight-forward, but it did everything I needed as a high school student...
Back in those days, you expected to get extra credit for handing in an assignment that came out of a computer. Your teachers seemed to understand just how much extra work went into using DisplayWrite 3!
Fortunately, an upgrade to WordPerfect 5 followed after using DW3 for am amazingly short period of time... Know what? I still use it. It just goes to show you that upgrades aren't as important as M$ would have you believe!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
at first my reaction was.... Cool, finally I can hack GEM to multitask... like I always wanted to back in the late 80's / early 90's....
But after looking at how primitive the source really is, the temptation has waned... how did they managed to achieve such coolness, when they did everything the hard way like that?
Before you could do anything you'd have to 'fix' it all... yuk
I Don't know where people are getting this crap about GEM was before the Mac. I sat in a Operating Systems class and the teacher said that "Apple paid for rights to GEM..." It must be high ed spreading this crap :)
This is sort of cool, from a nostalgic point of view. I remember reading in an old computer-magazine (which sure is funny, blocky graphics, 20kg portables etc) about GEM. The reviewers thought it was quite good. The funny thing was a small side article about GUI:s. There they mentioned, briefly, one other GUI: Windows from Microsoft.
:-)
// Simon
Check out this link That's by default how GEM on an Atari ST looked (at least TOS v2.x) The last incarnations of GEM by Atari were 'beefed up' a little bit with 256 color icons, 3D widgets, etc. I should know as I still have an Atari Falcon030, the last new Atari computer ever made. Actually, I run Linux on the beast, too! The Motorola 68030 running on a half speed bus cranks out a whopping 3.95 BOGOMips IIRC. :) Works well, though!
-----
God Proclaims Raspberries 'Now Even More Berrilicious'
Man this brings back memories.. back in 1986 when my family spent $2000 for an Amstrad XT clone that had 640KB of Ram, 20MB Hard drive, and a *colour* monitor. (CGA)... It shipped with DR-Dos and GEM... I can remember playing with the draw/paint program and being absolutely enthralled with the idea... Then I tried MacOS and never looked back... except for the three Linux boxen living under my desk. :-)
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...