Graphical Environment Manager

GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) was a graphical user interface shell developed by Digital Research.

History

The development started in 1983. It was marketed into the 1990's, both as a GUI shell sold as GEM Desktop for operating systems such as CP/M, DOS and FlexOS but also as a shell less graphics library primarily sold on an OEM basis as that could be used to develop and ship graphical applications that worked on the aforementioned OS's even though they did not have a graphical shell installed.

It is based on the GSX vector graphics interface library that was primarily built on components the company licensed from Graphic Software Systems and development of it was started as soon as GSX had shipped in 1982 although GEM itself was not officially shipped as a desktop retail product until February 1985 (OEM software was sent out in 1984, though). GEM was highly influenced by both the Xerox Star and the original Apple Macintosh and featured a user interface somewhere in between those two, this was not unexpected as GSS Inc. head honcho Lee Lorenzen had worked on the development of the graphics engine and Interpress for the Star at Xerox.

While not a big seller for the company it did manage to outsell Microsoft Windows by a considerable margin up until the release of Windows 3. The best known version of the system was on Atari ST computers where it was used as the GUI component of TOS. A number of European vendors of IBM PC and other Intel based hardware used the system, most notably Amstrad with their PC compatible budget computers and Apricot with their Sirius compatible systems.

There was also a lawsuit brought in by Apple in 1985 that ran into 1986 that stopped USA based computer manufacturers from shipping it with their systems since Apple had threatened to go after any maker that shipped GEM with their system and Digital Research simply did not have the financial wherewithal to offer OEM's indemnity from Apple's lawsuit.

Even as if not a big hit it became quite an influential product in the PC world, not the least since Microsoft Windows was developed in response to it, but there was the air of a missed opportunity about the whole project. GEM worked on hardware that was much slower than what the competition was using for their GUIs which was mostly processors like the 68000, Z8000 and 320016 which outran the 4.77MHz in an IBM XT class machine GEM was designed for quite comfortably, but at the same time GEM on an XT was quite reasonable if not exactly fast.

Even though the basic vector drawing engine in GEM was considerably stronger than what Windows had to offer. The Windows version was simply bog slow compared to GEM and almost unbearable on an XT, showing that DRI's software was much better optimised for low power hardware such as XT class machines than Microsoft's shell.

GEM simply gave customers a much better experience on the hardware of the time. Also Digital Research had released a GUI word processor and other graphical applications but for some reason did not develop these products any further.

The Apple lawsuit somehow managed to take the wind out of the marketing of GEM and DRI's CEO Gary Kildall was by that time showing much more interest in his Grolier CD-ROM project than in promoting GEM. Development of the system and related software was cut down considerably in late 1986 although a GEM 3 was eventually released in 1988, but that release had none of the features that had been in shown in the GEM/XM beta of 1986.

DRI continued developing the graphics engine though, partly in response to the developers of such programs as Artline and Ventura Publisher. By version 3 the engine even supported concepts that have otherwise only been seen in Display PostScript such as Bézier curves and soon thereafter added gradient support.

Products

• GEM Desktop
• GEM Programmer's Toolkit

Applications

• GEM Desktop Publisher
• GEM Draw
• GEM Graph
• GEM Paint
• GEM 1st Word Plus

Versions

GEM Desktop

• 1.1 (1985-04-10) - for IBM PC hardware (EGA/CGA)
• 1.2 (1985-09-09)

also released specifically for Apricot and Tandy machines

• 2.1 (1986-09-15)
• 2.2 (1987-05-29)
• 3.0 (1988-01-21) - VGA support, updated graphics engine and minor look and feel modifications
• 3.01 (1988-04-26)
• 3.11 (1988-11)
• 3.13 (1989-04)

GEM Programmer's Toolkit

• 1.0 (1984)
• 2.0 (1987)
• 3.0 (1988)
• 3.1 (1989)

OEM

Only shipped as a graphics library

• Version 4 - 1990 - Updated graphics engine with the Bézier curves from GEM/5 and support for gradients and much improved dialog boxes.
• Version 5 - 1988 - A version of 3.13 with updated graphics engine with Bézier curves and a refreshed 3D like "look and feel".

• GEM/XM - 1986 - Multitasking version of GEM, could also multitask DOS programs. Only released in a very limited fashion to OEM's as GEM 3 but quickly abandoned.

Open source release

The source for GEM was released as open source in the late 1990's by then owner Caldera, and at the same time the older executables that predate the open source release were released into the public domain, so you are free to download and use them.

Authors

• Michael Franusich, Lowell Webster (Digital Research)
• Novell
• Caldera

Publications

• Philip Balma; William Fitler: Programmer's Guide to GEM - SYBEX 1986, ISBN 0-89588-297-3
• Dave Prochnow: The GEM Operating System Handbook - TAB 1987, ISBN 0-8306-2742-1
• Joe Guzaitis; Joe Byrd; Philip Balma: The World of GEM - Prentice Hall 1987, ISBN 0-13-967696-1
• Barry Howling; Andrew Pepper: A Programmer's Guide to GEM - ISBN 1-85058-084-7

Links

• GEMWorld - Lots of GEM related info and download.
• David Givens GEM installer - And a couple of other goodies.
• John Elliot's GEM pages - One of the more comprehensive sites.
• GEM/3 Desktop - Archive of an old download site
• OpenGEM - Distribution and SDK
• GEM Programmers Workbench - Old example code