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My first computer was one of those cheap Amstrad pc clones, and it came with GEM on top of MS-DOS. GEM looked good but took a while to load from 5"1/4 floppy, and once loaded there were no useful graphical applications to speak of. I quickly stopped loading it and learned the DOS command line... Which came useful later to transition to Linux!
Im glad to hear that. An Amstrad also was my first computer. I accidentally wiped out the GEM floppy almost immediately after receiving the computer, not being aware what the format command actually did. So I was bummed for never having access to the cool GUI. Only the “dumb old DOS prompt”; Which, like you, forced me to learn DOS commands and eventually, Linux. I am a UNIX sysadmin today, and knowing DOS well was the key to getting my first IT job. So I’m glad to hear I didn’t miss out on much :-)
IBM PC "compatibles" and pirated DOS floppy disks are truly underrated. They built the foundation for a generation of software developers.
As a kid I had Atari 520ST(M) and GEM was like a… window to a magic world. It was so different from anything I had seen before (older Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64).
Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.
The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)
I would even say, that GEM itself saved the Atari ST platform from an instant failure. Apple Macintosh had an original Mac GUI, and the Commodore Amiga (developed by a former Atari team) was technically more advanced in many ways, even supporting a true preemptive multitasking. GEM on Atari ST offered a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price.
Once color-adjusted, OpenGEM [1, 2] looks hot in high-res. Visually, certainly one of the most beautiful GUIs. The rest of the gems are not (so) agreeable.
I dream about mac os 1 and (or) GEM desktop as SDL4 library. Many small project need gui.
I used GEM on some PCs around 1990. At that time I had an Archimedes and was studying in a computer school. I did some DTP (a school magazine) together with a couple of classmates, and we could have done it on my Arch. But then they would have been out of it, so we used their more ordinary PCs and used GEM on them. It worked smoothly and was very responsive.
I remember using a DTP on GEM called Finesse around the same time!
The first MS-DOS I used was MS-DOS 3.3 at the school computer lab, however when eventually I got my own PC, it came with DR-DOS 5, and the Gem inspired ViewMax.
I wanted to like viewmax, but I think Digital Research was short-sighted. They intended it to compete with dosshell.exe, but the real competitor was windows. I was excited to get to play with GEM, but I had no way to write programs for it.
Back then it still wasn't a given that Windows would really take off as it did.
For example, I only got that computer because getting one with OS/2 was out of my budget, and actually what I really wanted but for several reasons did not buy one, was an Amiga.
I did GEM application development on an Olivetti M24 and various Atari ST models.
I used Gem on https://www.retromobe.com/2016/10/amstrad-pc1512-1986.html?m...
Felt pretty advanced compared to BBC computer!
The original BBC computer was way to small for something like this, but you could get a version of the BBC Master that was able to run GEM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master
Ha! I came to say exactly the same! I (my dad) had a PC1512, CGA with B/W screen. It came with a serial mouse that we only took out of the box when we used GDE. I have to say we didn't use it much, as we were used to DOS and the "I boot the computer and directly run the application/game I want to use".
My dad used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot (I guess that it was v2.2 or so in the Amstrad).
I'd love to read this but substack is a no-go for me.
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