Digital Research didn’t want to miss the opportunity to play a part in the graphical software revolution. The first product DRI developed in this endeavor was GSX (or Graphics System eXtension) which began development in 1982 and saw release in 1983, the same year that the Apple Lisa and VisiCorp’s Visi-On hit the market. GSX was built of two main parts, GDOS which handled software interface and GIOS which handled hardware interface. GSX was Digital Research’s implementation of the Graphical Kernel System ISO standard which at the time of GSX’s market introduction hadn’t yet been fully ratified (that would come in 1985 as ISO 7942:1985). GSX was essentially a library and runtime that operated as a TSR on the IBM PC. As such, a user would load GSX via gsx
and then run his/her desired program like DR DRAW.
The GSX project was led by Don Heiskell, and the primary software developer on the team was Lee Jay Lorenzen who’d joined Digital Research after leaving Xerox PARC, and the marketing of GSX was handled by Rob LaTulipe.
GSX was unique in that it did more than display graphical content on a screen, it could also handle plotters, cameras, and printers. DRI had intended GSX to become the standard for microcomputers and to this end it was available on CP/M, CP/M-86, CP/M-68K, MS-DOS, MP/M, and so on. The CP/M variants and the MS-DOS variants differ in the naming of the files that comprise GSX. On MS-DOS, GSX.SYS
and GENGRAF.COM
make up GDOS, ASSIGN.SYS
is a text file that lists the device drivers available, and DD*.PRL
are the device drivers that constitute GIOS. On CP/M, GRAPHICS.CMD
is the GDOS, ASSIGN.SYS
is the listing of device drivers, and DD*.SYS
are the device drivers themselves.
In September of 1984, Acorn showed off its ABC 300 and 310. The 300 made use of an Intel 80286 with a 6502 serving as the I/O processor. It had 1MB of RAM, two 720K floppy disk drives, and a monochrome monitor. The 310 dropped one of the floppy disk drives and added a 10MB hard disk, and it had a color monitor. When these machines were demoed at the PCW Show, they were seen running an operating system with a graphical desktop.
This desktop environment was thought by most of those in attendance to be something that Acorn themselves had made. This wasn’t so. DRI had turned GSX into the Virtual Device Interface of a new product called Graphics Environment Manager or GEM by adding raster drawing, more fonts, and viewports. The GEM VDI was shipped with the GEM Application Environment Services or AES which provided the window manager and widgets, and with the Desktop which provided the file manager and launcher. Together with DOS, the typical memory consumption of GEM version 1 was about 127KB. DRI’s intention was to sell GEM licenses to OEMs, and anyone wishing to develop software for the GEM environment could do so for $500. This price bought the developer unlimited distribution rights, the developer’s toolkit which included software and documentation, and unlimited telephone support. This would allow a developer to write software for GEM and sell it to those who already owned GEM. A developer could instead pay DRI $1000 per year per product and bundle GEM with his/her own software. The first OEMs to license GEM were Apricot, Northern Telecom, Texas Instruments, Epson, Commodore, and Atari.
GEM was first shown by DRI at COMDEX between the 14th and 18th of November in 1984, and its design was oddly similar to the Macintosh and Lisa. Steve Jobs might have been flattered when he commented “You did a great job!” upon seeing it at COMDEX. This was no mistake. GEM team member Darrell Miller had brought a Macintosh home to his wife, and he said that his wife who absolutely disliked computers nonetheless positively received the machine due to its interface. The team then quite intentionally proceeded to clone the Macintosh’s interface realizing that Apple had hit upon something great. Of course, Apple had largely been imitating Xerox, and former Xerox folks were on staff at DRI, so this may have been bound to happen or even already in progress anyway. After its public unveiling, GEM was released on the 28th of February in 1985. Version 1.1 followed in April with CGA and EGA support.
In the June 1985 issue of BYTE, John Markoff and Phillip Robinson noted that Visi-On had largely disappeared, that Desq was moribund, and that Microsoft’s Windows had continued to be vaporware. GEM should have immediately dominated the market then, right? Wrong. Initially, GEM would only run on genuine IBM equipment, not compatibles. Every other hardware company would be required to pay a license fee, and this would mean that different hardware vendors would likely have differing and incompatible GEM versions. The software market would be fragmented which would increase the work for software developers. This changed by the time GEM launched, but not before DRI had alienated many developers. After release, things got even worse. Despite whatever Jobs’ first reaction may have been, Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, wasn’t pleased with Digital Research. No matter from where the original inspiration for both systems hailed, Apple was prepared to take the matter to court. At this point, fearing a long legal battle and high costs, Digital Research agreed to settle the matter with Apple. The result was a diminished, compared to the original, GEM/2 on the 24th of March in 1986. Some of the changes were rather minor like changing the trash icon and narrowing scroll bars, others were major like having fixed windows for the file manager. Of course more positively, GEM/2 received bug fixes, but it also gained VGA support.
Much like Desq and Visi-On, GEM now seemed destined to die. It did see some further work on PCs with GEM/XM in 1987. This was a multitasking version of GEM with a clipboard. It was, however, limited to ten GEM and DOS programs being run simultaneously. The even more ambitious X/GEM could handle full multitasking. X/GEM ran on FlexOS (think MP/M), OS/2’s Presentation Manager, and the X Windows System. GEM/3 was released on the 3rd of November in 1988 and came bundled with a few applications. Unlike its predecessors, this version removed support for the GSX API. A custom release was developed for CCP Development GmbH and titled GEM/4. This version shipped with CCP’s Artline 2, had a font system that was incompatible with other GEM versions, had the ability to attach menus to windows and not just the universal menu, and it could handle Bézier curves.
Another custom release was developed for GST’s Timeworks Publisher 2.1 and titled GEM/5. This version had a 3D visual style, font scaling, the Bézier features from version 4. GEM/5 also reported itself as version 4.0 to applications.
In 1990, GEM was turned into ViewMax. This was a file manager for DR DOS and couldn’t run GEM’s .app applications. It could, however, run all of the .acc desktop accessories like Calculator and Clock.
The most consequential and lasting impact of Digital Research’s GEM was actually to come from a license holder, Atari.