I can't say I'm wild about a world where Digital Research won. When they were dominant with CP/M, the tools and documentation were bad to the point where most machines had Z80 processors and DR only provided an 8080 assembler, so you had to DB significant bits of code to get the missing opcodes. Developing RSXs to access bank-switched memory under CP/M 3 could have been so much easier with a few examples and perhaps debugging tools. MS/DOS was just so much easier.
I remember using a Z80 assembler on a CP/M 1.x machine, way back when. If it wasn't by DRI could it possibly have been (shock, horror) Microsoft??? We did have a Microsoft Fortran compiler, which was crap, but that was mostly down to being floppy disk based.
Not trying to be funny, I used the assembler a lot, but I really can't remember who supplied it.
Oh, just had a thought - this was on Research Machines 380Zs, so perhaps it was Research Machines home-grown one?
Yes, there were one or two third party assemblers available. From memory, the issue was with the downstream tools - so for instance on CP/M 3.0, I think you had to use the DR one to be able to build an RSX (equivalent of a TSR under DOS. You could count the number of 8080 CP/M 3.0 machines on the fingers of one foot.
You've reminded me that I have a 380Z or 480Z in the loft - I must get it going again.
DR-DOS was more than alright, if Microsoft hadn't smothered it the computing world would look very very different today …
I'm sure this is a mostly forgotten part of computing lore; apologies for the Gemini's Overview:
“Microsoft actively stifled DR-DOS in the early 1990s through anti-competitive tactics, primarily using the "AARD code" in Windows 3.1, which deliberately created compatibility errors to scare users away from the competing operating system. Microsoft also used FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) tactics, such as hinting at future incompatibilities.
Key Tactics Used by Microsoft:
The AARD Code: Windows 3.1 installer contained heavily obfuscated code, discovered in 1992, that specifically checked if the system was running DR-DOS. If detected, it displayed a fake "Non-Fatal Error" message to induce panic.
Vaporware Announcements: Microsoft announced upcoming versions of MS-DOS to dampen demand for current versions of DR-DOS.
OEM Pressure: Microsoft leveraged its monopoly to ensure pre-installed Windows came with MS-DOS, hindering DR-DOS's retail market success.
While Digital Research released a patch (the "business update") to bypass the AARD code, the damage to market perception and OEM deals was significant. The case was later part of legal battles between Caldera (which acquired DR-DOS) and Microsoft.”
Yeah we know of the issues, and related lawsuits, and here we are OEMs still only sell GNU/Linux devices on their online shops, leaving to regular consumer stores Android, WebOS and Chromebooks.
Ah, and Valve had to come up with Proton, as game studios can't be bothered to natively target GNU/Linux.
> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development
Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time.
The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master.
> As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
Yes, there were, but compared with the Windows textbooks and Microsoft-supplied documentation for Windows, they were really not good. In the UK, they were translated (not well) from German. At least all the ones I owned were almost completely lacking in examples, and examples are really what you want when learning to use something.
Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle.
Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.
Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.
I have two Falcons here they're a compelling machine and still fun to play with.
But if I were to ask for a machine repro, a new motherboard, it would be in a different PCB form factor to get it into an ITX or m-ITX case. Because it's the cases and keyboards that go, not the machine.
I got all the GEM docs through Archie at umich.edu. You could get everything there including the entire GNU toolchain and MiNT so you could have a real development environment.
I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications.
Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.
> Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good
The same rubber domes and plastic plungers were Totally Unacceptable on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ and QL, Not Very Good on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and just what everyone uses on PCs today.
I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST.
WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
> I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
There was a port of MS Word, and it worked well. For some strange historical reasons I can't recall now, though, it was called and marketed as MS Write instead.
Write was the extremely basic free wordprocessor in Windows 3.x -- and so the name did the ST version a grave disservice.
>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly
Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.
Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.
WordPerfect beat them all.
Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC.
It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switched to Word and Windows vi clones.
I remember the CP/M version of WordStar gave you a patching tool that allowed you to insert screen and keyboard handlers in machine code, for your specific hardware (to speed things up), into the WS code. I can still remember how clever I thought I was when I got this to work!
Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero.
Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.
Apple sued DRI, which resulted in the crippling of GEM, the glaring one I remember were static windows. You heard that right, windows were not resizable but had fixed screen locations in the PC version.
Thankfully Atari licensed GEM for their 68000 machines before the lawsuit, and wasn't affected by these changes. The Atari ST (Sixteen/Thirtytwo) was very Mac like at the time. It even ran the Mac OS from Apple ROMs (Spectre 128 and Aladin) on its much cheaper hardware.
You do mention OpenGEM and FreeGEM, but not what's in them. They re-added all the features DR removed after the Apple lawsuit. They also added the features from GEM/4 and GEM/5 which John Elliot documented:
There were also other branches of GEM. DR did several...
• ViewMax, which was bundled with DR-DOS 5 and 6. This had Windows-style keyboard controls and could operate and manage DR-DOS's built-in multitasker, TaskMax.
• It also was working on GEM/XM which offered multitasking on plain old DOS.
• X/GEM ran on DR's RTOS, FlexOS. This was the realtime offshoot of DR Concurrent CP/M and Concurrent DOS: a family of full, native, protect-mode, multitasking DOS-compatible OSes for the PC, and 286s, and 386s. FlexOS is multitasking and so is X/GEM.
Some of the code from FreeGEM made its way back into ST GEM. There is a complete multitasking FOSS OS for the Atari ST and compatibles, called AFROS. It targets its own emulator, Aranym.
It originally had a minimal stub ROM replacement to boot the emulator: the OS is a native multitasking one so does not need much from Atari's ROM, which is not FOSS anyway. Atari's ROM is not just a BIOS: it contains the whole OS – the BIOS, and GEMDOS on top, and GEM on top of that.
But the community took that stub ROM and upgraded it to a fullly FOSS replacement for Atari TOS. In other words, with a replacement for GEMDOS and a replacement for GEM. That GEM replacement is partly built from FreeGEM code.
It's a lot of life for a long-dead desktop. I think some of this deserved a mention bigger than a single sentence.
I ran GEM on some of my early computers. Also bought both Windows 1 and Windows 2 to try. GEM was clearly superior from a user stand point. Windows 3 shipped and they just disappeared.
I was really interested in how they would respond to the challenge. IBM was working publicly with Microsoft on OS/2 so they had to know the market was going to change. The only real surprise was when Microsoft went all in on marketing Windows 3 and the rise of Office.
Borland tried to compete against Office and got killed. Perhaps with a competent GUI operating system it might have been different.
My family's first computer in the 80s was an Amstrad PC1512 (an IBM XT clone). We received 4 nice colorful system floppies with it, and it included a GEM Desktop. I remember sometimes logging into GEM, because it looked awesome, but we never had a single program to run on it, so it was practically useless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlUTzydzLVI
I've been on a bit of a rabbit hole with Digital Research in the last few days, specifically because I am utterly fascinated with Concurrent DOS.
I played with Concurrent DOS (and later MultiUser DOS) in PCem and I was utterly amazed. I hadn't realized that there was a preemptive multitasking operating system available to consumers as early as the mid 80's outside of AmigaOS.
I read the Wikipedia and I kind of understand why it didn't catch on, but man I kind of wish DRI (and Gary Kildall) was still around. I suspect if they were, they would have continued to make stuff that was at least interesting.
A lot of folks never used it, but MS DOS 5.0 came with DOSSHELL which actually had support for task switching - not quite concurrency, but it worked on a 286.
From what I've learned since, when you switched away from a program using Ctrl + Esc, DOSSHELL suspended it and dumped its conventional memory to a swap file on disk.
Used this to great effect so I could swap back and forth between QBASIC and other utilities.
Yeah I saw that when going down my rabbit hole. Definitely a cool and useful thing for what it is.
I just think that Concurrent DOS is cool because it is proper multitasking; proper time slicing and everything! And you could have multiple users logging into the same computer with terminals, à la Unix, all in the mid 80s!
I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to try and make a case for them to release the source code, but I have had a heck of a time getting ahold of anyone that might be able to point me in the right direction. I suspect the rights for it now reside with OpenText or something and they don’t even realize it.
I think the main problem was that systems to take advantage of it tended to be either fully bespoke or were produced in runs of dozens or hundreds at most. Customisation and installation (including wiring the terminals, in the days before networking was common) were protracted processes as well.
As a result, they were priced against the low-end of mid-range systems - so rather more than you might expect from looking at the raw bill of materials.
Their niche was rapidly eroded by simply running multiple single user PCs at the low end, and networked small Unix systems at the high end - both of which benefitted from higher economies of scale and needed less systems integration work.
Definitely interesting in a "what might have been?" way, though. I suspect that if DR had done a deal with IBM, then we might have ended up going down that sort of path for most of the 80s.
I wasn't around in the 80's, since I hadn't even been conceived yet, so it's hard for me to really know what the landscape was like then.
Just reading about all the cool stuff that was available in the 80's, a part of me is kind of baffled that Microsoft was the one that ended up winning. DR-DOS and Concurrent DOS seem, at least in a lot of ways, objectively better than MS-DOS. I'm kind of surprised that Microsoft didn't just rip them off, honestly.
I suspect it was largely IBM that was winning, for most of the 80s at least. MS was seen as being very much the junior partner.
Things started to wobble badly around 1988, with the release of the bug-ridden PC/MS DOS 4.x and the travails of OS/2 1.x. Most people doggedly stuck to DOS 3.3 despite its limitations (particularly the max HD size of 32 MB, at a time when 40 MB disks had become commonplace).
The IBM/MS wobble couldn't have come at a worse time for DR, though. Multiuser DOS was being discontinued, and DR-DOS wasn't mature enough until version 5 (the first to include ViewMAX) - by which time Windows 3.0 had already been released.
Honestly, Microsoft were very very lucky to end up in the position they found themselves in in the early 90s. The success of Win 3 was a shock even to them, and it utterly transformed the OS market.
Yeah, I guess I just like envisioning a universe where Gary Kildall was able to keep innovating and making cool stuff, instead of the tragic and depressing way that it actually ended.
I played with DR-DOS and OpenDOS in an emulator as well, and they both seem pretty cool, though bought of them were admittedly the later versions, and as I have stated a bunch of times, I really feel like Concurrent DOS and Multiuser DOS were way ahead of their time. Instead, the winner ended up being the objectively worse versions of things.
> I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to try and make a case for them to release the source code
Yeah, me too.
You can read a little of the results of my digging here:
I used that DOSSHELL method for a while until I got Quarterdeck Desqview set up - and from that point on, to me DOS was nothing more than a terminal interface to my pizzabox.
Sure would've been nice if the Desqview engineers and the GEM guys could've merged their efforts...
> Sure would've been nice if the Desqview engineers and the GEM guys could've merged their efforts...
OMG yes. I thought this myself at the time.
The thing is that they were rivals.
QEMM386 bolted protect-mode memory-management on top of DOS. DESQview bolted multitasking on top of QEMM. DESQview/X bolted a Unix-like GUI on top of that.
DR just sold multitasking OSes for the PC: Multiuser DOS for use with terminals, FlexOS with X/GEM for realtime stuff.
Symantec bought Quarterdeck. Perhaps Novell should have bought it first.
GEM on the PC was... ick... compared to on the Atari ST.
But the problem with GEM on the Atari ST is that in order to cram it into the 192KB ROM they ripped out some goodies like proportional font support which ended up being in an add-on called "GDOS" which was buggy, used up RAM, and most people didn't have it (it came with things like DTP software etc).
In general this was always the problem with the ST. The Tramiels shipped it early and cheap and awesome and I loved mine ... but then didn't pay enough attention to software updates until it was too late and the world had moved on. Jack Tramiel never really understood the value of a good software platform IMHO.
In the early 90s they seemed to learn the error of their ways, hired some talent, and released full multitasking re-entrant versions of TOS/GEM ... but too late.
GEM's architecture itself underneath actually was clearly built for a mulitasking architecture complete with message passing between applications (via AES application msg send / mailboxes) etc. It just came down to failure to iterate.
Also the article mentions DR "hiring some people from Xerox" but in fact fails to note that the actual original architect and author of GEM itself was hired from Xerox (Lee Lorenzen). He joined up with DR because he tried to pitch Xerox on porting their Star office concepts down to PC-class hardware and they didn't go for it. His pitch video can actually be seen here:
Wow, I just remembered using AES when I wrote an 'accessory' (menu bar app) that converted bitmap to vector for an ST DTP app that supported both. An early form of plugin I suppose. Pretty ahead of the MS mess at the time.
> One could argue DRI bowed out too soon. Then again, it’s questionable whether it would have won against Windows anyway. Microsoft was the larger company and had OEM agreements with all of the major PC makers.
Well, it is also that Windows even at version 1.0 was much more capable than GEM. Better documentation, better tools, better API and better functionality.
GEM was really just a shell over DOS and applications were actually DOS programs that called a special interrupt handler to make API calls. While this allowed any language that could make EXE files and call interrupts to be used to make GEM apps, it also meant that GEM inherited all the limitations from DOS, like the inability to run multiple applications at the same time (DR did eventually make GEM/XM that allowed switching between applications but it was still only one application active at any given time). Windows meanwhile not only could run multiple applications, but it also had a software-based virtual memory system that allowed applications to swap in/out both data and code to fit in the available memory (this required custom compiler support so, unlike GEM, you couldn't use any old compiler but on the other hand it you could make more complex applications).
The GEM API was also very barebones, you could create windows but all you could do with them was to draw inside. Dialog boxes were a completely separate thing that could take a tree of "objects" to draw inside them but even then the functionality was limited (the object types are hardcoded and while there is a "custom" type, all it does is provide a callback for drawing). You could work around some of the functionality by implementing some of it yourself - for example there is a call to draw an object tree (object trees are actually a flat array of fixed size structures where the first three fields define 16bit indices inside the tree for each object - this probably saved some bytes of memory at the cost of flexibility loss and TBH the extra bytes added for the code to work with the tree probably ate back those saved bytes, if not made things worse) so i think (never tried it) you could draw buttons, etc in a window when you receive the WM_REDRAW message but there is no event message propagation.
Meanwhile on Windows everything is a "window" in a window tree with a consistent approach to how things are handled. On GEM everything is a special case.
I get the impression that the GEM developers basically had some idea of what their desktop would look like and implement the functionality to do just that and nothing else with little room for flexibility or later expandability.
EDIT: also the graphics functionality was very limited, e.g. with hardcoded colors. Here are some GEM API docs in case anyone is interested:
You can do a lot of stuff with the system as it is since it does expose a lot of its internals (and when you need to replicate functionality, there isn't that much in there to replicate so it is perfectly doable), but my point is that it wasn't as flexible or capable as Windows 1.0.
It wasn't just Microsoft's marketing skills that made Windows overshadow GEM, it was also that Windows was genuinely a better product - both from a technical and a functional perspective.
Atari ST user here. AES is as you say rather bare bones. In some ways it's more analogous to X windows "Xt" X intrinsics than it is to any "widget" toolkit -- in that it gives you the facilities for constructing trees of drawn objects, registering applications, communicating between applications, receiving events, opening windows, redrawing windows, etc. but for actual active widgets ... only provides premade alerts, dialogs, windows, menubars, and a file selector. But in fact those pieces are made from object trees like you say. So, yes, with your own event handling you absolutely could write your own widgets directly into the window by drawing an object tree, and more savy developers did that.
I suspect there was maybe an intent to eventually build something higher level above it, still. Just that never happened, or was never standardized. There are in fact some C-level libraries for the Atari ST that do, but they're more recent inventions.
It's not a bad architecture, just incomplete. It wasn't aiming for -- nor would they have had the budget to make -- the same space as MS Windows in that it wasn't a full and complete environment in that way. Even on the Atari ST where they controlled the whole stack instead of being hoisted over MS-DOS.
Yep, I know about all that - I had big cupboard full of the damn things in my flat in london [various ataris (6502 and 68k based ones), dragon 32 (coco lookalike), peculiar IBM pc clones, and other stuff]
A few years ago I got my nephew to do up the flat for sale, and he junked the lot - at some point you have to get rid of things.
If I recall it's been done on both (emulator and real hardware).
The original version of GEMDOS (the replacement for DOS or CP/M when running on 68k) was in fact developed on the Lisa as a 68k dev machine [also some Motorola VME dev boards I think?) before actual Atari HW was available. So it's a full circle thing.
I can't say I'm wild about a world where Digital Research won. When they were dominant with CP/M, the tools and documentation were bad to the point where most machines had Z80 processors and DR only provided an 8080 assembler, so you had to DB significant bits of code to get the missing opcodes. Developing RSXs to access bank-switched memory under CP/M 3 could have been so much easier with a few examples and perhaps debugging tools. MS/DOS was just so much easier.
I remember using a Z80 assembler on a CP/M 1.x machine, way back when. If it wasn't by DRI could it possibly have been (shock, horror) Microsoft??? We did have a Microsoft Fortran compiler, which was crap, but that was mostly down to being floppy disk based.
Not trying to be funny, I used the assembler a lot, but I really can't remember who supplied it.
Oh, just had a thought - this was on Research Machines 380Zs, so perhaps it was Research Machines home-grown one?
Yes, there were one or two third party assemblers available. From memory, the issue was with the downstream tools - so for instance on CP/M 3.0, I think you had to use the DR one to be able to build an RSX (equivalent of a TSR under DOS. You could count the number of 8080 CP/M 3.0 machines on the fingers of one foot.
You've reminded me that I have a 380Z or 480Z in the loft - I must get it going again.
DR-DOS 5 was alright and Viewmax a nice way to manage files and directories.
DR-DOS was more than alright, if Microsoft hadn't smothered it the computing world would look very very different today …
I'm sure this is a mostly forgotten part of computing lore; apologies for the Gemini's Overview:
“Microsoft actively stifled DR-DOS in the early 1990s through anti-competitive tactics, primarily using the "AARD code" in Windows 3.1, which deliberately created compatibility errors to scare users away from the competing operating system. Microsoft also used FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) tactics, such as hinting at future incompatibilities.
Key Tactics Used by Microsoft:
While Digital Research released a patch (the "business update") to bypass the AARD code, the damage to market perception and OEM deals was significant. The case was later part of legal battles between Caldera (which acquired DR-DOS) and Microsoft.”https://share.google/aimode/JJs7wliOGtvnme6LY” [Tech Monitor/Wikipedia]
Yeah we know of the issues, and related lawsuits, and here we are OEMs still only sell GNU/Linux devices on their online shops, leaving to regular consumer stores Android, WebOS and Chromebooks.
Ah, and Valve had to come up with Proton, as game studios can't be bothered to natively target GNU/Linux.
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your comment would have been just as interesting as the first line followed by a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code .
> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development
Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time.
The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master.
I think many others may have similar thoughts.
Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones.
As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
> As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
Yes, there were, but compared with the Windows textbooks and Microsoft-supplied documentation for Windows, they were really not good. In the UK, they were translated (not well) from German. At least all the ones I owned were almost completely lacking in examples, and examples are really what you want when learning to use something.
Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle.
Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.
Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.
Going down this rabbit hole, I realize that ST hardware for musicians is still huge. And the dongles as still working as intended, apparently.
And then this blew my mind:
https://re-falcon.com
Quite the underground scene:
https://indyclassic.org
I have two Falcons here they're a compelling machine and still fun to play with.
But if I were to ask for a machine repro, a new motherboard, it would be in a different PCB form factor to get it into an ITX or m-ITX case. Because it's the cases and keyboards that go, not the machine.
We almost had something like that with the Medusa and Hades Atari clones.
People attempted to patch the routines decades ago and it never produced a stable result.
The dongle has already been reverse engineered in the last couple of years and replicas are for sale.
Yes I am aware of this, and read the HDL to understand what they did. But they are hardware only. The point is to run in emulation.
GEM was in TOS on the later Atari ST models. TOS was named after Jack Tramiel, Tramiel Operating System.
Not Jack, his son, Sam.
None of these are true. It's "The Operating System" according to era documentation.
Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) was on the Retro Hour talking about the Atari ST at the start of the year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-UOBjJjGuM
There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe.
Even though dongles were a popular copy protection.
Then again, software like Cubase didn't use much of GEM IIRC and did their own graphics.
> There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe.
Hence why Gerhard Lengeling put at least as much time into the design of the dongle as he did Creator/Notator itself.
I got all the GEM docs through Archie at umich.edu. You could get everything there including the entire GNU toolchain and MiNT so you could have a real development environment.
Between DM sessions, of course. Or Time Bandits.
I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications.
> Not so sure about this.
WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.
Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.
> who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good
I dunno man. I came from a ZX Spectrum (via several other machines, it's true) and compared to that, the ST keyboard was great.
> Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good
The same rubber domes and plastic plungers were Totally Unacceptable on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ and QL, Not Very Good on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and just what everyone uses on PCs today.
I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST.
WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
> I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
There was a port of MS Word, and it worked well. For some strange historical reasons I can't recall now, though, it was called and marketed as MS Write instead.
Write was the extremely basic free wordprocessor in Windows 3.x -- and so the name did the ST version a grave disservice.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/microsoftwrite.html
>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly
Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.
Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.
WordPerfect beat them all.
Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC.
Did you know Protext is freeware now?
https://www.aptanet.org/protext/
I do a bootable DOS system on a live USB key and it includes Protext. :-)
https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
> WordPerfect beat them all.
It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switched to Word and Windows vi clones.
I remember the CP/M version of WordStar gave you a patching tool that allowed you to insert screen and keyboard handlers in machine code, for your specific hardware (to speed things up), into the WS code. I can still remember how clever I thought I was when I got this to work!
It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php
Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero.
Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.
I only used GEM in the form of Xerox Ventura Publisher. I used it to write all my undergrad papers.
It ran quite well on my 286.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventura_Publisher
Apple sued DRI, which resulted in the crippling of GEM, the glaring one I remember were static windows. You heard that right, windows were not resizable but had fixed screen locations in the PC version.
Thankfully Atari licensed GEM for their 68000 machines before the lawsuit, and wasn't affected by these changes. The Atari ST (Sixteen/Thirtytwo) was very Mac like at the time. It even ran the Mac OS from Apple ROMs (Spectre 128 and Aladin) on its much cheaper hardware.
I knew viewmax had static windows, but I always wondered why. Now I know.
Windows were only fixed in the desktop application, you could still move and resize them in your own apps.
Didn't know, thanks for pointing that out. Never used GEM outside Atari, just something I read at the time.
How much was an Atari plus Spectre/Aladin?
The problem was you also needed to buy a Mac to get the licensed ROMs.
I don't remember where I got them, but I think they could be copied with an EEprom programmer.
I wonder why GEM is back on bloggers' radar again? Last September, Nemanja Trifunovic did a good in-depth history, here:
https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...
He missed out on the recent history of the environment, and at the time, I wrote a blog post adding more info on what happened next:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html
You do mention OpenGEM and FreeGEM, but not what's in them. They re-added all the features DR removed after the Apple lawsuit. They also added the features from GEM/4 and GEM/5 which John Elliot documented:
https://www.seasip.info/Gem/
There were also other branches of GEM. DR did several...
• ViewMax, which was bundled with DR-DOS 5 and 6. This had Windows-style keyboard controls and could operate and manage DR-DOS's built-in multitasker, TaskMax.
• It also was working on GEM/XM which offered multitasking on plain old DOS.
• X/GEM ran on DR's RTOS, FlexOS. This was the realtime offshoot of DR Concurrent CP/M and Concurrent DOS: a family of full, native, protect-mode, multitasking DOS-compatible OSes for the PC, and 286s, and 386s. FlexOS is multitasking and so is X/GEM.
Some of the code from FreeGEM made its way back into ST GEM. There is a complete multitasking FOSS OS for the Atari ST and compatibles, called AFROS. It targets its own emulator, Aranym.
https://aranym.github.io/
It originally had a minimal stub ROM replacement to boot the emulator: the OS is a native multitasking one so does not need much from Atari's ROM, which is not FOSS anyway. Atari's ROM is not just a BIOS: it contains the whole OS – the BIOS, and GEMDOS on top, and GEM on top of that.
But the community took that stub ROM and upgraded it to a fullly FOSS replacement for Atari TOS. In other words, with a replacement for GEMDOS and a replacement for GEM. That GEM replacement is partly built from FreeGEM code.
It's a lot of life for a long-dead desktop. I think some of this deserved a mention bigger than a single sentence.
I ran GEM on some of my early computers. Also bought both Windows 1 and Windows 2 to try. GEM was clearly superior from a user stand point. Windows 3 shipped and they just disappeared.
I was really interested in how they would respond to the challenge. IBM was working publicly with Microsoft on OS/2 so they had to know the market was going to change. The only real surprise was when Microsoft went all in on marketing Windows 3 and the rise of Office.
Borland tried to compete against Office and got killed. Perhaps with a competent GUI operating system it might have been different.
My family's first computer in the 80s was an Amstrad PC1512 (an IBM XT clone). We received 4 nice colorful system floppies with it, and it included a GEM Desktop. I remember sometimes logging into GEM, because it looked awesome, but we never had a single program to run on it, so it was practically useless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlUTzydzLVI
> we never had a single program to run on it
Amstrad GEM came with a couple of apps thrown in!
LocoScript BASIC 2, a full GUI BASIC language, and GEM Paint.
Pics of the media here:
https://www.dosdays.co.uk/computers/Amstrad%20PC1000/softwar...
The famous demo Tiger image on an original 'Strad:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/12gmqrm/the_famo...
I've been on a bit of a rabbit hole with Digital Research in the last few days, specifically because I am utterly fascinated with Concurrent DOS.
I played with Concurrent DOS (and later MultiUser DOS) in PCem and I was utterly amazed. I hadn't realized that there was a preemptive multitasking operating system available to consumers as early as the mid 80's outside of AmigaOS.
I read the Wikipedia and I kind of understand why it didn't catch on, but man I kind of wish DRI (and Gary Kildall) was still around. I suspect if they were, they would have continued to make stuff that was at least interesting.
A lot of folks never used it, but MS DOS 5.0 came with DOSSHELL which actually had support for task switching - not quite concurrency, but it worked on a 286.
From what I've learned since, when you switched away from a program using Ctrl + Esc, DOSSHELL suspended it and dumped its conventional memory to a swap file on disk.
Used this to great effect so I could swap back and forth between QBASIC and other utilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell
Yeah I saw that when going down my rabbit hole. Definitely a cool and useful thing for what it is.
I just think that Concurrent DOS is cool because it is proper multitasking; proper time slicing and everything! And you could have multiple users logging into the same computer with terminals, à la Unix, all in the mid 80s!
I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to try and make a case for them to release the source code, but I have had a heck of a time getting ahold of anyone that might be able to point me in the right direction. I suspect the rights for it now reside with OpenText or something and they don’t even realize it.
I think the main problem was that systems to take advantage of it tended to be either fully bespoke or were produced in runs of dozens or hundreds at most. Customisation and installation (including wiring the terminals, in the days before networking was common) were protracted processes as well.
As a result, they were priced against the low-end of mid-range systems - so rather more than you might expect from looking at the raw bill of materials.
Their niche was rapidly eroded by simply running multiple single user PCs at the low end, and networked small Unix systems at the high end - both of which benefitted from higher economies of scale and needed less systems integration work.
Definitely interesting in a "what might have been?" way, though. I suspect that if DR had done a deal with IBM, then we might have ended up going down that sort of path for most of the 80s.
I wasn't around in the 80's, since I hadn't even been conceived yet, so it's hard for me to really know what the landscape was like then.
Just reading about all the cool stuff that was available in the 80's, a part of me is kind of baffled that Microsoft was the one that ended up winning. DR-DOS and Concurrent DOS seem, at least in a lot of ways, objectively better than MS-DOS. I'm kind of surprised that Microsoft didn't just rip them off, honestly.
I suspect it was largely IBM that was winning, for most of the 80s at least. MS was seen as being very much the junior partner.
Things started to wobble badly around 1988, with the release of the bug-ridden PC/MS DOS 4.x and the travails of OS/2 1.x. Most people doggedly stuck to DOS 3.3 despite its limitations (particularly the max HD size of 32 MB, at a time when 40 MB disks had become commonplace).
The IBM/MS wobble couldn't have come at a worse time for DR, though. Multiuser DOS was being discontinued, and DR-DOS wasn't mature enough until version 5 (the first to include ViewMAX) - by which time Windows 3.0 had already been released.
Honestly, Microsoft were very very lucky to end up in the position they found themselves in in the early 90s. The success of Win 3 was a shock even to them, and it utterly transformed the OS market.
Yeah, I guess I just like envisioning a universe where Gary Kildall was able to keep innovating and making cool stuff, instead of the tragic and depressing way that it actually ended.
I played with DR-DOS and OpenDOS in an emulator as well, and they both seem pretty cool, though bought of them were admittedly the later versions, and as I have stated a bunch of times, I really feel like Concurrent DOS and Multiuser DOS were way ahead of their time. Instead, the winner ended up being the objectively worse versions of things.
What was buggy about DOS 4? I ran it for years until I switched to DR DOS 5.
There were two entirely separate DOS 4s
The multi-tasking DOS 4 that had its next release be branded as OS/2
and the other one, a conventional DOS stopgap product
> I have been trying to track down whoever the hell owns the license to Concurrent/Multiuser DOS to try and make a case for them to release the source code
Yeah, me too.
You can read a little of the results of my digging here:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/the_many_derivatives_...
Happy to compare notes -- my email is in my profile, or I'm easily Googled.
Well, these days, Google will tell you I'm an aardvark or some other bot slop, but you can find me. I always use this screen name everywhere.
I sent you an email to the address in your profile. Would love to compare notes on this stuff.
I used dosshell on IBM PC DOS 4.0. I don't remember that feature. Was it added in 5?
I used that DOSSHELL method for a while until I got Quarterdeck Desqview set up - and from that point on, to me DOS was nothing more than a terminal interface to my pizzabox.
Sure would've been nice if the Desqview engineers and the GEM guys could've merged their efforts...
> Sure would've been nice if the Desqview engineers and the GEM guys could've merged their efforts...
OMG yes. I thought this myself at the time.
The thing is that they were rivals.
QEMM386 bolted protect-mode memory-management on top of DOS. DESQview bolted multitasking on top of QEMM. DESQview/X bolted a Unix-like GUI on top of that.
DR just sold multitasking OSes for the PC: Multiuser DOS for use with terminals, FlexOS with X/GEM for realtime stuff.
Symantec bought Quarterdeck. Perhaps Novell should have bought it first.
GEM on the PC was... ick... compared to on the Atari ST.
But the problem with GEM on the Atari ST is that in order to cram it into the 192KB ROM they ripped out some goodies like proportional font support which ended up being in an add-on called "GDOS" which was buggy, used up RAM, and most people didn't have it (it came with things like DTP software etc).
In general this was always the problem with the ST. The Tramiels shipped it early and cheap and awesome and I loved mine ... but then didn't pay enough attention to software updates until it was too late and the world had moved on. Jack Tramiel never really understood the value of a good software platform IMHO.
In the early 90s they seemed to learn the error of their ways, hired some talent, and released full multitasking re-entrant versions of TOS/GEM ... but too late.
GEM's architecture itself underneath actually was clearly built for a mulitasking architecture complete with message passing between applications (via AES application msg send / mailboxes) etc. It just came down to failure to iterate.
Also the article mentions DR "hiring some people from Xerox" but in fact fails to note that the actual original architect and author of GEM itself was hired from Xerox (Lee Lorenzen). He joined up with DR because he tried to pitch Xerox on porting their Star office concepts down to PC-class hardware and they didn't go for it. His pitch video can actually be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMBGRZftS30
Lorzenen later left DR and created Ventura Publisher.
> GEM on the PC was... ick... compared to on the Atari ST.
It was fine on an Olivetti M24. Same screen resolution and colour as the ST, Logitech mouse plugged into the back of the keyboard.
Here is a different recent -- and IMHO much better -- history which covers that:
https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...
Odd it doesn't do much on the Atari ST lineage really apart from mentioning it. Lots of articles seem to have this problem.
There was a lot more going on in the 68k / Atari ST line than on PC, in the end.
In the 90s most of that was in Germany though. Read up on "Magic" OS sometime.
And these days, the modern variant of GEM is really EmuTOS and also Xaaes on the ST line.
It is a bit.
I tried to cover some of that here:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html
Wow, I just remembered using AES when I wrote an 'accessory' (menu bar app) that converted bitmap to vector for an ST DTP app that supported both. An early form of plugin I suppose. Pretty ahead of the MS mess at the time.
Starting from the original codebase I'm working on a RUST version, just for fun.
:-D
> One could argue DRI bowed out too soon. Then again, it’s questionable whether it would have won against Windows anyway. Microsoft was the larger company and had OEM agreements with all of the major PC makers.
Well, it is also that Windows even at version 1.0 was much more capable than GEM. Better documentation, better tools, better API and better functionality.
GEM was really just a shell over DOS and applications were actually DOS programs that called a special interrupt handler to make API calls. While this allowed any language that could make EXE files and call interrupts to be used to make GEM apps, it also meant that GEM inherited all the limitations from DOS, like the inability to run multiple applications at the same time (DR did eventually make GEM/XM that allowed switching between applications but it was still only one application active at any given time). Windows meanwhile not only could run multiple applications, but it also had a software-based virtual memory system that allowed applications to swap in/out both data and code to fit in the available memory (this required custom compiler support so, unlike GEM, you couldn't use any old compiler but on the other hand it you could make more complex applications).
The GEM API was also very barebones, you could create windows but all you could do with them was to draw inside. Dialog boxes were a completely separate thing that could take a tree of "objects" to draw inside them but even then the functionality was limited (the object types are hardcoded and while there is a "custom" type, all it does is provide a callback for drawing). You could work around some of the functionality by implementing some of it yourself - for example there is a call to draw an object tree (object trees are actually a flat array of fixed size structures where the first three fields define 16bit indices inside the tree for each object - this probably saved some bytes of memory at the cost of flexibility loss and TBH the extra bytes added for the code to work with the tree probably ate back those saved bytes, if not made things worse) so i think (never tried it) you could draw buttons, etc in a window when you receive the WM_REDRAW message but there is no event message propagation.
Meanwhile on Windows everything is a "window" in a window tree with a consistent approach to how things are handled. On GEM everything is a special case.
I get the impression that the GEM developers basically had some idea of what their desktop would look like and implement the functionality to do just that and nothing else with little room for flexibility or later expandability.
EDIT: also the graphics functionality was very limited, e.g. with hardcoded colors. Here are some GEM API docs in case anyone is interested:
https://www.seasip.info/Gem/vdi.html (low level API, draw graphics, input devices, etc)
https://www.seasip.info/Gem/aes.html (relatively high level API, make windows, define dialogs, messages, etc)
https://www.seasip.info/Gem/aestruct.html (some structures)
https://www.seasip.info/Gem/aesmsg.html (event message types)
I wrote a hypertext system that created dialog boxes on the fly and used the callback for the custom object type to implement links.
You can do a lot of stuff with the system as it is since it does expose a lot of its internals (and when you need to replicate functionality, there isn't that much in there to replicate so it is perfectly doable), but my point is that it wasn't as flexible or capable as Windows 1.0.
It wasn't just Microsoft's marketing skills that made Windows overshadow GEM, it was also that Windows was genuinely a better product - both from a technical and a functional perspective.
Atari ST user here. AES is as you say rather bare bones. In some ways it's more analogous to X windows "Xt" X intrinsics than it is to any "widget" toolkit -- in that it gives you the facilities for constructing trees of drawn objects, registering applications, communicating between applications, receiving events, opening windows, redrawing windows, etc. but for actual active widgets ... only provides premade alerts, dialogs, windows, menubars, and a file selector. But in fact those pieces are made from object trees like you say. So, yes, with your own event handling you absolutely could write your own widgets directly into the window by drawing an object tree, and more savy developers did that.
I suspect there was maybe an intent to eventually build something higher level above it, still. Just that never happened, or was never standardized. There are in fact some C-level libraries for the Atari ST that do, but they're more recent inventions.
It's not a bad architecture, just incomplete. It wasn't aiming for -- nor would they have had the budget to make -- the same space as MS Windows in that it wasn't a full and complete environment in that way. Even on the Atari ST where they controlled the whole stack instead of being hoisted over MS-DOS.
There's now a version of GEM you can run on a Lisa. But 68KMLA is down so I have no easy way to link to the relevant thread. :(
Whoo, has anyone actually got a working Lisa? Or is this emulation?
There are a lot of working Lisas out there.
But there weren't too many Lisas (working or otherwise) when the thing came out!
Well OK, "a lot" can mean a lot of different things depending on context ;)
In the vintage computer collector/enthusiast scene, there are probably dozens of working Lisas. How's that?
Yep, I know about all that - I had big cupboard full of the damn things in my flat in london [various ataris (6502 and 68k based ones), dragon 32 (coco lookalike), peculiar IBM pc clones, and other stuff]
A few years ago I got my nephew to do up the flat for sale, and he junked the lot - at some point you have to get rid of things.
I will never buy anything except a laptop again.
If I recall it's been done on both (emulator and real hardware).
The original version of GEMDOS (the replacement for DOS or CP/M when running on 68k) was in fact developed on the Lisa as a 68k dev machine [also some Motorola VME dev boards I think?) before actual Atari HW was available. So it's a full circle thing.