Mail Archives: opendos/1998/11/01/09:22:04
I apologize to the LIST for the long post and rant in advance.
On Sat, 31 Oct 1998 18:31:18 -0800 (PST) Steven Hurdle
<ya830 AT victoria DOT tc DOT ca> writes:
> 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
I've already got computers. I just need graphical interfaces for them.
And this is for a headstart so the teachers can use the publishing and
word processing stuff and the kids can run games (dos ones). They just
want to be able to use the computer's they have for basic stuff. Nothing
fancy, no internet, no networking, no advanced file management. Just
click on this and it works. And that is what GEM does.
> 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.).
There's a way in the manual that tells you how (at least for GEM/3 3.13)
to make GEM move out of memory for that particular program. I'll hunt it
up for you.
> New Deal is setting up a non-profit foundation that will do just
>that:
>http://www.newdeal.org)
But the original thread that I am talking about to begin with was
interested in a GUI for DR-DOS. And THAT is what I think New Deal will
NOT go for. They will not just give the rights over to Caldera for that
purpose. Besides DR made a version just for DR-DOS called Viewmax. I
haven't seen it yet or compared it to GEM/3, but I heard it had specific
functionalities that were only implemented when running over DR-DOS.
> 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?
You're still making the wrong point here. The point is not to have MORE
stuff that people can buy, but to have a supported version of DOS with an
included GUI that is available for free (albeit limited) for personal
use. NewDeal defeats that purpose. I wish I could consider myself a
charity and get it for free, but the truth is that most people just want
to have a viable alternative to Windoze without added expense. It
already ticks me off that I bought a license to three different upgrades
to that OS, yet they were all just bug fixes that then added more bugs
that had to be fixed later on. Thus forcing the maker of every software
program I owned to rewrite their code so they had to then charge for
their upgrades because they had to buy all that new development stuff to
upgrade their capabilities of programming. It's a never ending cycle
that alot of people want out of. I'd use Linux myself but I don't really
have the time to spend on customizing a system such as that. Maybe in
another year or two it will be even more user friendly now that there is
more mainstream support (intel, etc.) for it. But until that day DR-DOS
and it's support has been what I was looking for.
By the way, I haven't seen any games either but it will run DOS games.
I emailed the guy in charge of GemWorld to get some more information.
Their site has mainly user sent stuff. I'm gonna get the Programmer's
toolkit and manual and go from there. I think it uses Pascal source.
By the way, Just to show you there is more you can do with GEM, you
should look for a site on TOS for the ATARI TT computers. It was GEM on
top of the atari OS and they still sell it on computers in Europe. It
even has access to Unix software through an emulator. It has
multi-tasking, support for more than the usual monochrome looking
screens, and lot's of other add-ins including Internet access. So the
GUI as a whole has a lot of potential if Caldera could contact the makers
of the current TOS and go from there.
>
Thanks,
Philip Lettkeman philDOTmanATjunoDOTcom
"Every man has his price. Mine just happens to be the love of my
FAMILY."
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