[whartung]

> It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor.

You can't really get it from these screenshots, but I'll give an example of what you're talking about.

I remember GEM when it came out, and it simply looked terrible. Not just their color choice, but simply that low resolution display there were stuck with in the day. It looked cheap, and like a toy. Specifically in contrast to the Mac, which, while it was a smaller monitor, and even lower pixel count, the overall display was crisper, and cleaner, brighter, better contrast.

The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy.

Also, don't forget that the NeXT computers were striving for being "3M" computers. "3M" for 1M pixels, 1 MIPS, and "1 Megapenny" ($10,000). Definitely a different class of machines to OTS PCs of the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer

[cmrdporcupine]

RE: GEM, the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor was actually a super high quality monitor that was known at the time for producing a crisp comfortable image, and it was higher resolution (640x400) than the Mac (512x342).

GEM on it actually looked really good. The problem was two fold: with the Atari you had the choice of one or the other (colour or mono), the colour was very low resolution, GEM looked squished and crappy and cheap in low (360x200) & med-res (640x200) on colour .. and on the application development side there just wasn't the same caliber and quantitiy of developers to build good looking GEM applications.

But I mean if you look at some of the better more sophisticated applications like Cubase or Calamus or the original version of Logic, they were pretty nicely designed.

The base window decorations were a bit chunky compared to the Mac .. but not awful, and also easily changed. There were accessories that re-themed things via changing the font.

GEM over top of DOS on the PC? Yeah, awful.

The Ventura Publisher branch of GEM looked decent though

[rmason]

I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast.

For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3.1 when I first used the Mosaic browser on the then new world wide web and my life was never the same again.

[cmrdporcupine]

GEM was very much an incomplete project, is my take on it. Which makes sense when you consider DR had to be -- seemingly for the life of the company -- pretty scrappy. Once Windows was on the scene, there was no point in them dumping a boatload of resources into it.

Its original advocate and designer, Lee Lorenzen, left DR to go create his own startup and make Ventura Publisher (which shipped with its own copy of GEM). Which was then bought up by Xerox. Which is also where Lorenzen came from in the first place before DR. (GEM came out of his desire to build out a Xerox Star-like system for commodity PCs, which he tried to pitch at Xerox but failed, so did at DR instead.)

On the ST side it went off in other directions, the two codebases forked significantly.

[lproven]

Yup.

Nemanja Trifunovic's recent history is pretty good, I thought.

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...

[lproven]

> I don't know what happened to GEM.

Choosing to interpret you literally:

Apple sued, and DR had to cripple GEM 2. The Atari ST version was unaffected.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/01/business/digital-research...

https://books.google.im/books?id=w3IudMVoEusC&pg=PA2&redir_e...

Caldera made it GPL in 1999.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1999/04/27/gem-the-gui-t...

The FreeGEM project modernised it and added back not only all the functionality that DR removed, such as overlapping windows and desktop icons and things, but also additional features from the runtime-only GEM/4 and GEM/5, such as Bézier curves and things.

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/freegem2.html

OpenGEM was the last distro of FreeGEM getting updates, and it's included in FreeDOS.

https://multiboot-windows.dscloud.me/All_Pages_for_DOS_GUIs/...

Back on the Atari ST, EmuTOS started out as a minimal stub boot ROM for the all-FOSS AFROS replacement OS for the Aranym emulator; over time, EmuTOS evolved into a complete FOSS replacement ROM for the ST line -- and to recreate GEM, they went back to some of those Caldera source files.

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

As to the bigger more general question of why PC GEM didn't compete...

DR's GUI was originally one element of DR's catalogue. GEM ran on Concurrent DOS, and DR-DOS included a cut-down version that's just a file-manager and app-launcher, called ViewMAX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewMAX

(The beta version of ViewMAX 3 ended up FOSS too.)

DR had a full multitasking DOS-compatible OS on the 286, something like 4 years before OS/2 1.0. However, it used a feature that Intel removed from the shipping 80286 chip. The shipping PC AT could not multitask DOS apps on Concurrent DOS 286.

So DR pivoted: it turned CDOS 286 into FlexOS, an RTOS that happened to have some DOS compatibility. It turned GEM into X/GEM, a multitasking version that could use the underlying OS's multitasking.

(ViewMax on DR-DOS 6 can manage multitasking full-screen DOS sessions using DR's TaskMAX multitasker.)

FlexOS with X/GEM evolved into many forms, and was sold by Siemens and many other companies, as an embedded control RTOS for all kinds of hardware.

The last ones on sale were for cash registers -- PC-based point-of-sale tills. IBM 4690 OS was still on sale in the 2000s, and it's based on DR FlexOS and X/GEM, with app development in Java that displays in a GUI that was a remote descendant of GEM.

Toshiba still supports it.

https://commerce.toshiba.com/wps/portal/marketing/?urile=wcm...

[cmrdporcupine]

One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Not just the EmuTOS stuff which is itself amazing. Commercial ones (now open sourced!) like MagiC but then XaAES and so on.

http://xaaes.gokmase.com/

You can even run MagiC on Linux now:

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/magiclinux

[lproven]

> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations.

Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translation, and stuff like that. I ended up learning a lot about the history of ST GEM, and one aspect was how its cleanly-layered design let people just re-implement bits and plug them back into the original.

Which is what led to FreeMINT and TOS 4, and the desire for a FOSS distro of that is what led to AFROS.

> You can even run MagiC on Linux now

Oh! I knew he'd open-sourced it. I did mention MagiC in passing in my follow-up to Nemanja's history:

https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html

I didn't realise there had been recent activity. I must try it. Thank you!

[cmrdporcupine]

Being in the North American sphere and distinctly post-Atari by the mid 90s, I didn't really know about MagiC until much later. It's pretty amazing what he built!

Too bad it's 100% assembler. Though very nicely written assembler.

Hm. I have a Firebee downstairs untouched. I am tempted to point an LLM at the MagiC sources and have it port to Coldfire :-)

[zozbot234]

> The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy.

The Amiga was designed to look good on the crappiest TV around. It was a home computer, not a professional workstation. But if you had a nice monitor, high-res B&W screen modes were easily available.

[abanana]

Indeed, is this a comparison of home computers running on a cheap TV, with business computers running on an expensive monitor?

I remember being amazed at how sharp the Amiga Workbench looked when I upgraded from an old TV to a "real" monitor. On the flip side, I was disappointed with how the ground in Cannon Fodder was now a collection of individual crisp pixels, instead of all blurring together as before. That gave me a very clear illustration of how it was "designed to look good on the crappiest TV".

[icedchai]

Amiga OS 2.0 was a huge improvement in that regard! It had more of a 3D look.