GSX In late 1984, GEM started life at DRI as an outgrowth of a more general-purpose graphics library known as GSX (Graphics System Extension), and the system was shipped as GEM/1 on 28 February 1985.
GEM/1 GEM Desktop 1.0 was released on 28 February 1985.
GEM Desktop 1.1 was released on 10 April 1985 with support for
CGA and
EGA displays. A version for the
Apricot Computers F-Series, supporting 640×200 in up to 8 colors, was also available as
GEM Desktop 1.2. Digital Research also positioned
Concurrent DOS 4.1 with GEM as alternative for
IBM's
TopView. DRI originally designed GEM for DOS so that it would check for and only run on IBM computers, and not
PC compatibles like those from
Compaq, as the company hoped to receive license fees from compatible makers. Developers reacted with what
BYTE described as "a small explosion"; it reported that at a DRI-hosted seminar in February 1985, more than half of the attendees agreed that GEM's incompatibility with Compaq was a serious limitation. Later that month the company removed the restriction. Applications that supported GEM included Lifetree Software's
GEM Write. At this point,
Apple Computer sued DRI in what would turn into a long dispute over the "look and feel" of the GEM/1 system, which was an almost direct copy of
Macintosh (with some elements bearing a closer resemblance to those in the earlier
Lisa, available since January 1983). This eventually led to DRI being forced to change several basic features of the system. (See also:
Apple v. Digital Research.) Apple would later go on to sue other companies for similar issues, including their
copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and HP. In addition to printers the system also contained drivers for some more unusual devices such as the
Polaroid Palette.
GEM/2 DRI responded with the "lawsuit-friendly"
GEM Desktop 2.0, released on 24 March 1986, which eventually added support for
VGA, sometime after its release in 1987. It allowed the display of only two fixed windows on the "desktop" (though other programs could do what they wished), changed the trash can icon, and removed the animations for things like opening and closing windows. It was otherwise similar to GEM/1, but also included a number of bug fixes and cosmetic improvements. In 1988 Stewart Alsop II said that GEM was among several GUIs that "have already been knocked out" of the market by Apple, IBM/Microsoft, and others.
GEM XM GEM XM with "GEM Desktop 3.0" was an updated version of GEM/2 in 1986/1987 for
DOS (including
DOS Plus) which allowed task-switching and the ability to run up to ten GEM and DOS programs at once, swapping out to
expanded memory (XM) through
EMS/
EEMS or to disk (including
RAM disks, thereby also allowing the use of
extended memory). Data could be copied and pasted between applications through a
clipboard with filter function (a feature later also found in
TaskMAX under
DR DOS 6.0). Digital Research planned to offer GEM XM as an option to GEM
Draw Plus users and through OEM channels. The GEM XM
source code is now freely available under the terms of
GNU General Public License.
GEM/3 The last retail release was
GEM/3 Desktop, released on 3 November 1988, which had speed improvements and shipped with a number of basic applications. Commercial sales of GEM ended with GEM/3; the source code was subsequently made available to a number of DRI's leading customers. While GEM/2 for the PC still provided a GSX API in addition to the GEM API; GEM/3 no longer did.
GEM/4 for CCP Artline GEM/4, released in 1990, included the ability to work with
Bézier curves, a feature still not commonly found outside the
PostScript world. This version was produced specifically for
Artline 2, a drawing program from the German company
CCP Development GmbH. The system also included changes to the font management system, which made it incompatible with the likes of
Timeworks Publisher. Artline 1 still ran on GEM 3.1.
GEM/5 for GST Timeworks Publisher Another version of GEM called
GEM/5 was produced by
GST Software Products for
Timeworks'
Publisher 2.1. It contained an updated look with 3D buttons, along with features such as on-the-fly font scaling. It came complete with all the standard GEM 3.1 tools. This version was produced from GEM 3.13 with only the Bézier handling taken from GEM/4.
ViewMAX for DR DOS file manager with user-defined colors GEM Desktop itself was spun off in 1990 as a product known as
ViewMAX which was used solely as a file management shell under
DR DOS. In this form the system could not run other GEM programs. This led to a situation where a number of applications (including ViewMAX) could exist all with their own
statically linked copy of the GEM system. This scenario was actually rare, as few native GEM programs were published. In 1991,
ViewMAX 2 was released. In these forms, GEM survived until DRI was purchased by
Novell in June 1991 and all GEM development was cancelled.
X/GEM Throughout this time DRI had also been working on making the GEM system capable of multitasking. This started with
X/GEM based on GEM/1, but this required use of one of the multitasking CP/M-based operating systems. DRI also produced X/GEM for their
FlexOS real-time operating system with adaptations for
OS/2 Presentation Manager and the
X Window System under preparation as well.
Ventura Publisher Lee Lorenzen left soon after the release of GEM/1, when it became clear that DRI had no strong interest in application development. He then joined with two other former DRI employees, Don Heiskell and John Meyer, to start
Ventura Software. They developed
Ventura Publisher (which was later marketed by
Xerox and eventually by
Corel), which would go on to be a very popular
desktop publishing program for some time.
Atari versions ) running HomePage Penguin and Desktop Development of the production 68000 version of GEM began in September 1984, when Atari sent a team called "The Monterey Group" to
Digital Research to begin work on porting GEM. Originally, the plan was to run GEM on top of
CP/M-68K, both ostensibly ported to
Motorola 68000 by DRI prior to the ST design being created. In fact, these ports were unusable and would require considerable development. Digital Research also offered GEMDOS (originally written as GEM DOS, it was also called "Project Jason"), a DOS-like operating system aimed to port GEM to different hardware platforms. It was available for
8086 and
68000 processors and had been adapted to the
Apple Lisa 2/5 and the
Motorola VME/10 development system. Atari decided in January 1985 to give up on the existing CP/M-68K code and instead port DRI GEMDOS to the Atari ST platform, referring to it as
TOS. As Atari had provided most of the development of the 68000 version, they were given full rights to continued developments without needing to reverse-license it back to DRI. As a result, the Apple-DRI lawsuit did not apply to the Atari versions of GEM, and they were allowed to keep a more Mac-like UI. Over the next seven years, from 1985 to 1992, new versions of TOS were released with each new generation of the ST line. Updates included support for more colors and higher resolutions in the raster-side of the system, but remained generally similar to the original in terms of GKS support. In 1992, Atari released TOS 4, or
MultiTOS, along with their final computer system, the
Falcon030. In combination with
MiNT, TOS 4 allowed full multitasking support in GEM.
Continued development 5 When
Caldera bought the remaining Digital Research assets from Novell on 23 July 1996, initial plans were to revive GEM and ViewMAX technologies for a low-footprint user interface for
OpenDOS in mobile applications as
Caldera View, but these plans were abandoned by
Caldera UK in favour of
DR-WebSpyder and
GROW.
Caldera Thin Clients (later known as
Lineo) released the source to GEM and GEM XM under the terms of
GNU GPL-2.0-only in April 1999. The development of GEM for PC continues as
FreeGEM and
OpenGEM. On the Atari ST platform, the original DRI sources were ported again to be used in the free and open source
TOS clone
EmuTOS. New implementations of the AES portions of GEM have been implemented from scratch in the form of
XaAES, and MyAES, both of which are fully re-entrant and support multitasking on top of the
FreeMiNT multitasking extensions to
TOS. ==Description==