Mail Archives: opendos/1998/10/31/18:23:25
Some info on GEM.
GEM was developed in 1983-1984 as a reaction to Apple Lisa and Macintosh. The first version coming out in 1984 had a Mac style desktop, with movable and sizable windows.
As it was developed for 8088 computers and it developers were quite good, it was very fast at that time. The reason why the desktop has changed to a two window version was the outcome of an Apple lawsuit for the look and feel of GEM,
which was to Mac a like.
If Caldera wants to, it could bring out a desktop version with movable windows, as the code
is still in the source. Just a compile switch away.
If you can get hold of a GEM version 1.x, you can just take the desktop exe and rsc file and use it with gem 2.x or 3.x.
As for screen and printer drivers, till 1993-94 a lot of VGA card manufacturers added a driver for Ventura Publisher. The 'DOS' version of ventura was based on GEM/3. It was the competitor of PageMaker and very popular, so support of
vga card vendors has lasted a long time.
GEM support stopped before the DR-DOS version with Task manager. There has been a beta version of GEM with a kind of GEM based task switcher, but that never made it.
GEM is made of two components, VDI, the grafics interface, comparible to ms windows GDI and the AES, the windowing part, that is based on the VDI.
The VDI for dos is in assembler and will take some effort to be ported to 32 bits. Although a largely C-version exists for the Atari 520ST.
The AES and desktop are easily ported to 32 bits when you take out support for the desk accessories.
A multi user version of GEM was released with another DR OS, Flexos, so Caldera could use that version for 32 bits.
I was quite fond programming for GEM. When we converted our app, size about 2 MB to ms windows 3.0, it was running about 30% slower.
robert du chatenier
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