4 ms·

I had GeoWorks on a C64 and was amazed by what it could do. Felt much more cohesive than Windows 3.1 in terms of being a consistent desktop environment. Anyone

I had GeoWorks on a C64 and was amazed by what it could do. Felt much more cohesive than Windows 3.1 in terms of being a consistent desktop environment. Anyone remember KeyDraw? GEM-based vector graphics package for DOS, based on the GUI libraries from GEM Desktop which was the descendant of GEOS / GeoWorks, if I recall. Fantastically learnable program that introduced 5-year-old me into the world of vector art. (On that front, anyone remember Aldus Intellidraw? Even better, _still_ a better UI than Illustrator, though held back by lack of antialiasing and weak postscript support).

joshu 8y ago
I don’t think GEM was related to GEOS
cmrdporcupine 8y ago
GEM predates GEOS by many years. It was a product of Digital Research, and was started in the early 80s by Lee Jay Lorenzen who had worked (or interned?) at Xerox on the Star and wanted to bring those concepts over to commodity x86 desktop machines. Lorenzen went on to create the successful DTP program, Ventura Publisher, which itself used a bundled copy of GEM. The wikipedia article on GEM has a good chunk of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager A 68000 port of GEM and GEMDOS (which itself was a kind of fork of DR's own CPM/68k) were the basis of the Atari ST operating system "TOS". Some of the tales of how that all went down are documented by one of the participants here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000 All of this an entirely separate effort from GEOS/GeoWorks, though in some respects the two efforts are similar in that they aimed to bring the full WIMP experience to fairly low-powered machines. But the philosophy was quite different. PC/GEOS was written in a lot of assembler, specifically for x86 (after they'd done something similar for the C64 in 6502 assembler in fact), specifically for commodity PCs. GEM was written in C with some amount of portability in mind (in theory), and ran on top of DOS, CP/M, or GEMDOS (I believe there was also attempts to get it to run on top of Unix). The first version of GEM was developed and ran on the Apple Lisa hardware.
- joshu 8y ago
  I recommend reading the entirety of the dadhacker site. It's amazing.

joshu 8y ago

I don’t think GEM was related to GEOS

cmrdporcupine 8y ago

GEM predates GEOS by many years. It was a product of Digital Research, and was started in the early 80s by Lee Jay Lorenzen who had worked (or interned?) at Xerox on the Star and wanted to bring those concepts over to commodity x86 desktop machines. Lorenzen went on to create the successful DTP program, Ventura Publisher, which itself used a bundled copy of GEM. The wikipedia article on GEM has a good chunk of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager A 68000 port of GEM and GEMDOS (which itself was a kind of fork of DR's own CPM/68k) were the basis of the Atari ST operating system "TOS". Some of the tales of how that all went down are documented by one of the participants here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000 All of this an entirely separate effort from GEOS/GeoWorks, though in some respects the two efforts are similar in that they aimed to bring the full WIMP experience to fairly low-powered machines. But the philosophy was quite different. PC/GEOS was written in a lot of assembler, specifically for x86 (after they'd done something similar for the C64 in 6502 assembler in fact), specifically for commodity PCs. GEM was written in C with some amount of portability in mind (in theory), and ran on top of DOS, CP/M, or GEMDOS (I believe there was also attempts to get it to run on top of Unix). The first version of GEM was developed and ran on the Apple Lisa hardware.

joshu 8y ago
I recommend reading the entirety of the dadhacker site. It's amazing.