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Development of the production 68000 version of GEM began in September 1984, when Atari sent a team called "The Monterey Group" to Digital Research to begin work on porting GEM. Originally, the plan was to run GEM on top of CP/M-68K , both ostensibly ported to Motorola 68000 by DRI prior to the ST design being created.
Indeed, the Atari ST with GEM resembles the Macintosh so closely that it has been nicknamed the "Jackintosh." Atari GEM also includes such graphics features as bit block transfer (a sprite-like animation technique) and high-resolution vector drawing. Significantly, though, an Atari ST with GEM differs in at least two ways from the Macintosh.
GEM has now also been chosen for the upcoming Atari ST computers. It will work with the new TOS operating system, which is a close relative of DRI's CP/M. In the Atari STs, the GEM overlay, the TOS operating system, and the device drivers including hard disk, floppy disk, Centronics parallel, and RS232C serial are all to be contained in 192K of ROM .
If you are an experienced Atari user you will face a challenging new world when you first boot up your Atari ST. The 512K memory 16-bit 520ST computer, based on the powerfull 68000 microchip and the GEM Operating Environment, does many things differently from the previous generation of 8-bit Ataris.
- Competing with Windows
- Finding Refuge in The Atari St
- What Happened to Gem? Niche Uses
The lack of speed and lack of software pretty much doomed GEM on the PC. Windows didn’t do much better; it was 1990 before Windows, finally in version 3, gained widespread adoption and use. But DRI discontinued GEM in 1988, two years earlier. I don’t think it was coincidence. By 1990, the 486 CPU was out. Few people could afford it, but it existed,...
In the meantime, GEM survived on the Atari ST. With an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 as the baseline, speed wasn’t a terrible concern. The 8 MHz 68000 was roughly equivalent to an 8 MHz 80386SX, had such a chip existed. In 1985, it was hot stuff. Hardware-wise, the ST matched up closely to its contemporary Macs and outperformed the PCs of its day, making GE...
And it’s not entirely fair to declare 8086 GEM’s dying date as 1988. It lived on for several years as a graphical runtime library for DOS, most famously used by Ventura Publisher, one of the more popular desktop publishing packages for PCs. In hindsight, it’s possible to see what went wrong. Had DRI been supplying the underlying operating system to...
Apr 26, 2023 · In addition to GEM Write and GEM Paint which Atari included with their PCs, there was a whole suite of useful applications released alongside GEM back in its day, including word processors, graphics packages and desktop publishing software, and there’s a dedicated presentation package and even a flat file database too, and most of these predate their Microsoft Office equivalents.
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What is GEM Desktop?
PRG and APP files are executable programs, using the GEM graphic environment. TOS are executable programs, that run under TOS (text mode). GTPs and TTPs are executable programs (Gem or Tos) needing parameters, added by the user when running from a command line, or asked by the program when running under GEM. ACC files are desk accessories.
