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.

Comments

This is a great thing!

[Some guy named Chris]

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.

This would have been good news - 8 years ago.

[RinkRat]

Gah! My beloved GEM! Why do you taunt me so? I hung with you 'till the bitter end! All I have now is my ST monitor, hooked up to my Jaguar.

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)

GEM & GEOS reminiscences

[dublin]

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.

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 /tmp/Earth\ Day*