Date:	Sat, 31 Oct 1998 18:31:18 -0800 (PST)
From:	Steven Hurdle <ya830 AT victoria DOT tc DOT ca>
X-Sender:	ya830 AT vtn1
To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com, Philip A Lettkeman <phil DOT man AT juno DOT com>
cc:	Philippe DOT Dallemagne AT ensem DOT u-nancy DOT fr
Subject:	Re: Gem vs. NDO
In-Reply-To:	<19981031.055324.-112285.0.Phil.man@juno.com>
Message-ID:	<Pine.GSO.3.95.iB1.0.981031112801.889A-100000@vtn1>
MIME-Version:	1.0
Reply-To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com

|I suppose both of you have registered to get all the functionality of
|NDO?  Right now I'm dealing with a school that has donated computers and
|absolutely NO budget to purchase software.  That's why I feel my find was
|so good.  

   I don't know about your area of the world, but there are non-profit
organisations in some parts of the continent that are acquiring used
computers, installing New Deal, and donating them to schools and
charities.  There's info on it at New Deal's site. 

http://www.newdealinc.com

|Also the GEM you downloaded.  Which version was it?  GEM/3 3.1??  
|I know that GEM doesn't have support for a lot of stuff.  But building on
|it's compactness and fast performance, somebody should be able to take it
|further:  The apps written directly for GEM (made them faster than dos

   GEM does run very well, but I found it puzzlingly slow at certain
activities (particularly coming back to GEM after leaving Telix having
loaded Telix from GEM and GEM having kept itself in RAM).  Screen updates
and responses to mouse clicks seem slower than NDO on a 386DX/40.  The
native GEM serial mouse driver appears to be broken and I had to load
MOUSE.COM (which sucks up unfortunately large amounts of RAM) to get the
mouse working (the native serial driver would move almost instantly to the
top of the screen with the slightest push!  Very frustrating.).

|obviously easy to program for I don't see why it couldn't be updated.  On
|top of that, I don't think NDO would GIVE away anything of their suite
|after already having to buy the GEOS rights to make it.  Caldera would be

   New Deal is setting up a non-profit foundation that will do just that:
http://www.newdeal.org)

   Send the New Deal Foundation e-mail about it.

|better served by taking something in the public domain; such as GEM seems
|to be, and altering it for their needs.

   I still have GEM on my hard drive and I'll play around with it some
more.  It doesn't seem to have any personal finance software, though, like
Pocket Quicken and NewBanker that are available for NDO, which is too bad.
I haven't found any games for it at GemWorld either.  Do you know of any?



							Steven Hurdle

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