From: Jon Glass (jonglass_at_usa.net)
Date: Sat Aug 14 2004 - 23:42:55 PDT
On Aug 15, 2004, at 2:11 AM, Alex Santos 100MB Neostrada Mail wrote:
> These products could all run on an original 640K IBM PC/AT system,
> driving 120 DPI monitors from Sigma Designs. They were built with the
> GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) from Digital Research (creator of
> CP/M) and ran as a full graphical OS application shell on top of good
> old DOS.
Believe it or not, I was actually intimately acquainted with the GEM
desktop, as well as Xerox desktop publishing systems, and used both
back in the '80s. I use Finesse and Ventura Publisher quite extensively
for years--until I got a Mac. ;-) In fact, I used these systems, both
on a color 286 and a mono 8088 Tandy laptop in grayscale. However, I
never found anything in the GEM to recommend it, other than the
Bitstream font system. :-) Scaleable fonts! Amazing things! (OK, so you
had to build the font sizes you needed, but it sure beat the mono fonts
built into the printer that I was forced to use in Word Perfect at the
time. :-)
Personally, while I used GEM, I was never a fan of it. It had a few
problems, some of which are that it was still dependent on DOS. For one
thing, There never was a lot of stuff written for it, so you had to
keep your DOS programs around, and also, you needed to go to DOS on
occasion to do things, especially in my case, as I had a good supply of
batch files. Another, is that it inherited many of the same weaknesses
of DOS 8 character files with the 3 digit extension, the DOS file
system in general, and the character-based look that both the Xerox
desktop and the Mac vanquished. Lastly, and most importantly for me,
was that GEM was sloooow. You could argue that it was my choice of
computers, but it was supposed to run on these things. Suffice it to
say, the whole time I was using the GEM desktop environment, I longed
for a Mac, and to be able to just do things. In any case, these
criticisms I have leveled against GEM are the same ones leveled against
Windows in the article i referenced, so I think that his point still
stands. He did mention the GEM in an addendum, and gives a short
comment: "GEM (early ’80s GUI OS for PCs from Digital Research; which
was not nearly as “Mac-like” as GEM aficionados would have you
believe)" :-)
Having said all that, I posted the link, because of the relevent
mention of the Newton about 2/3 of the way into the article. That's
what I thought was worthy of discussion--but I'll gladly talk about my
GEM days. ;-)
-- -Jon Glass Krakow, Poland <jonglass_at_usa.net> -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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