Digital Research's GEM opens a new window on Linux

Digital Research's GEM was one of the earliest graphical environments for PC compatibles, and an inspired hack has now resurrected it on Linux. GEM for Linux is a port of the Atari ST's graphical desktop, created by prolific Slovenian developer Tomaž Štih. Applications share a display server that can output directly through …

[theOtherJT]

I miss my little green desktop.

First computer I ever had with a GUI. I loved that ST. I'm going to have to break the emulator out this evening.

[werdsmith]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

I bought Lattice C compiler for it, for my first foray into GUI programming and I was totally lost for months while I got my head round it.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

> I bought Lattice C compiler for it, for my first foray into GUI programming

I never had an Atari or Amstrad PC but I bought some of the developer doco that a bookstore was chucking out. I think aspiring GUI devs in AU looked to other platforms (Mac, Amiga?)

I was taken by the resemblance between the GEM interfaces and GKS stuff I studied at Uni. I just looked up GKS on WikiP — the resemblance wasn't coincidental.

The risk of buying cheap books just because they are cheap is that you end up reading vast amounts of stuff you know you will never need — like everything no one ever needed to know about the Zilog Z8000 cpu and mmu (although I did see an Olivetti M20… once.)

[joeldillon]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

I got Modula-2 because it was half the price (50 quid I think and the cheapest C compiler was 100? Remember when compilers cost money? gcc freeware /did/ exist but you needed 2.5 megs of RAM minimum which I did not have). Still, my first high level language and it put me in a good place to learn C on my own time when I went to uni.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

I used Prospero C to do the programming for my MSc and LaTeX to write the dissertation, both on an Atari Mega ST4. Nowadays LaTeX is well over a gigabyte ...

[LionelB]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

The core LaTeX code (a set of macros built over the TeX engine) is actually pretty small – measured in megabytes. LaTeX distributions may well be multiple gigabytes – much of which, though, will comprise fonts and documentation (and loads of packages you're never going to use). You can set up a more minimal, stripped-down LaTeX installation if you wish (see, e.g., TinyTeX or BasicTeX).

[Antony Shepherd]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

Likewise, I even had the monochrome monitor for it that let you use the highest resolution mode. Had a lot of fun with the ST back in the day.

[xc8]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

I still miss that monochrome monitor.. around 70Hz guys - text and gfx nice and so crispy was really a pleasure, there were even a few hi-res games the could run there..

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

I might finally get round to testing the 1040STFM that's been in my loft for 35 years

[John F Jennings]

Re: I miss my little green desktop.

I had ab Atari 400 as my first computer with a monochrome hirez screen and the tape drive...

I was fascinated with the POKE command. 6502 heaven. I remember it had undocumented graphics modes you could only access with a sequence - but get 16 shade grayscale (or colour with the monitor) in a crazy resolution (to really piss off the Spectrum owners). I think defender might have been written in it?

There was also hardware sprites (and bullets if so inclined)

It eventually caught fire (literally!)

[MyffyW]

I practice architecture-driven design

I'm going to have that made up as a T-Shirt

[steelpillow]

I use AI, but I practice architecture-driven design

Damned with faint praise.

[LionelB]

Re: I use AI, but I practice architecture-driven design

Well, in the context of the hyped agentic/vibe-coding paradigm(s), yes. For an experienced coder it's actually a practical, useful and time-saving approach, which pretty much describes my (occasional) use of AI: for well-delineated modular functionality, while I maintain strict control of overall design.

[Dan 55]

Re: I practice architecture-driven design

It certainly sounds better than saying you spend the day arguing with a bingo machine.

[karlkarl]

I like it. Possibly with the weak uptake of Wayland, we may see more libdrm / framebuffer projects pop up.

I have my own attempts in this area here (libdrm + software rasterizer + imgui):

https://research.thamessoftware.co.uk/glass/

For fun, I am currently refactoring DOSBox and vncviewer (tigervnc) to use libdrm directly. Makes for a much cleaner solution with less dependencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

But "Wayland is the future". At least for all those distros which drank the free Kool-Aid.

[Will Godfrey]

Agreed

It doesn't say a lot for the future, does it? it removes almost all user display choice.

Why any distro would settle on such an unfinished mess is beyond belief.

[CodeAssembler]

Past experience

At college we had a room of Atari 520ST units that were basically used as serial terminals to an HP mini. The Atari units were obviously very capable and I picked up GEM from there, but they only had a terminal application for software.

I also had a BBC Master with a 80186 (yep, the one that didn't seem to get adopted for anything). As I recall, the coprocessor came bundled with a copy of GEM effectively running on a "PC".

[Liam Proven]

Re: Past experience

> the coprocessor came bundled with a copy of GEM effectively running on a "PC".

Oh, nice.

Master 512

https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Master512.html

http://www.cowsarenotpurple.co.uk/bbccomputer/master512/index.html

Read a lot about them but I only entered the Acorn world personally when I bought an Archimedes.

1 of only 2 machines I ever heard of that came with Digital Research DOS-Plus.

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

The other was the Amstrad PC1512 I mention in the article.

(There are others in the Wikipedia article but they're new to me.)

DOS-Plus is essentially what later became DR-DOS.

[CodeAssembler]

Re: Past experience

Excellent. So many details that I seem to have forgotten. :-( Thanks for the reminder and the links.

BTW, your articles are very much a highlight for me. There are so many shared reference points - I guess we're of a similar vintage. :-)

[Liam Proven]

Re: Past experience

> BTW, your articles are very much a highlight for me. There are so many shared reference points - I guess we're of a similar vintage. :-)

Oh, thank you very much!

I am not quite 60 yet, but getting disturbingly close. First computer I touched was some thing that filled a room in the 1970s and used paper tape. Lots of it. My dad put me in the output bin and I played in there.

First I _used_ was a Commodore PET, I think a 4032: proper keyboard, no cassette tape drive.

First I owned was a 48K Spectrum. :-)

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Past experience

I predate both of you, I suspect: my first computer was a Sinclair MK14 which is still somewhere around the place. I believe my late father supplied reverse polarity to it though, so it's probably not a runner.

[VerySlowData]

Re: Past experience

MK14 - I never managed to get mine going properly, got hold of an Acorn "rack" computer with Eurocard modules. Later at work, I recall changing ZX80 tv modules for use here in Oz...

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Past experience

Acorn? Or perhaps Tangerine, as I did?

[HappyDog]

Re: Past experience

First computer I owned was a 16K ZX Spectrum bought with my "berry money". Money I had earned picking berries in the summer. I managed to save up half the money and the mother, bless her, put up the rest. Upgraded the following year to 48K with the expansion kit bought with that summer's berry money. Wrote a poker playing game that got published in a magazine, which paid for a 12" black and white portable TV, which meant I was no longer constrained to using the Family TV. Heady days.

[Antony Shepherd]

Re: Past experience

My first computer was a Tangerine Microtan 65, where I started with the single board and added on to it over a number of years. My first programming was in 6502 machine code. The 10K Basic interpreter didn't come until after i'd bought the first expansion card.

Five or so years on that got cannibalised to build a Mandarin Micro Systems IP68 using a 6809 processor, and I'd be pleasantly surprised if someone here says they had one!

At one point i had an Oric-1, but sold that to buy a Spectrum because I wanted the games!

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Past experience

Sadly no, and I wish I still had my Tangerine system. I think it got accidentally left behind in a now-demolished building.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Past experience

I won a Commodore 4032 for my school in a competition in 1982 When they finished with it, a few years later, they gave it to me and it ended its days assessing superconductors under test in the Oxford physics department, thanks to its IEEE-4888 interface which talked to the nanovoltmeter we used to detect transition.

I wrote a terminal emulator for it in basic, running though IEEE to RS-232 and RS-232 to Gandalf adaptors ... at 50 baud, tops.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Past experience

I have an 80186 at home, running fine inside an HP Palmtop 1000CX.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Past experience

> I have an 80186 at home, running fine inside an HP Palmtop 1000CX.

Huh! That is a new model to me.

https://palmtops.net/DOSPALMTOP/hp1000cx.html

I played with a 95LX and reviewed the amazingly chunky but for its time rather mind-blowing HP Omnigo 700LX:

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/hp-omnigo-700lx

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Past experience

It was given to me a few years back from a university that had been using it for field data input back in the 90s. It is fun to play with, but I dislike is the poor contrast of its screen, it's hard on my old eyes.

It was fun installing Windows 3.0 on it though. And sourcing a serial mouse. And well, and a serial adapter for the proprietary HP connector.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Past experience

Funnily enough, I've got an 80186 chip and various support chips which I rescued from a pile of junk industrial boards at work, the intent was to see if I could build a PC.

ISTR there was a Sirius and an Apricot machine that used those chips but the memories are very old now.

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: Past experience

RM (Research Machines) used them in overpriced PCs for sale in education, at least in the UK.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Past experience

The RM system was called Nimbus.

[Peter Mount]

Re: Past experience

The disk images for that are available, I last ran it on my master with an internal pitube.

For many, the 80186 was unheard-of. It was a SOC version of the original 8086 rather than an enhancement like the 80286, 89386 & later chips.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Past experience

First computer I heard about was the IBM 360 - never actually saw it, but my dad was the head of the Prudential's data processing department during the period of the transfer of all the firms data from dozens of punched card machines to this.

First computer I played with as the Sinclair ZX81, and first I owned was a BBC model B

[Antony Shepherd]

Re: Past experience

In the mid-80s I did a HNC Software Engineering course at my local college, and one of the things we had to do is write code for an 80186 based single-board computer to control a three-axis robot. The code would be cross-compiled on a PC to load onto the single boards.

One snag. The robots hadn't been delivered yet, neither had the single board computers. Not even by the end of the course. I just submitted a file which was basically all comments saying what the program SHOULD do if we had anything to run it on and any robots to control, and got a good mark for that!

But that course led to my first IT job, and the qualification helped me get into university once my first IT job had ended, so can't complain!

[shanecoughlan]

A warm blast from the past

Nostalgia… and also a little bit of thoughtfulness. It was really fun to collaborate around FreeGEM and make the OpenGEM distro, but it was most rewarding to see it bring to life usability on an ancient computer that my (very young at the time) sister had trouble using via command line.

By the way, my apologies to everyone who wanted OpenGEM 7. I became too tied up in work from 2006 onward, and gradually my priorities shifted. Big shout out to Jim Hall and the FreeDOS community for including OpenGEM 5 or 6 in FreeDOS distros for many years.

[bitwise]

Re: A warm blast from the past

Hi Shane,

I was just looking at the OpenGem GitHub the other day and wondering what happened to you.

Was there anything from OpenGem that didn't get upstreamed ?

I remember putting together a dual boot system with OpenGem around 2005, great stuff.

[shanecoughlan]

Re: A warm blast from the past

No, everything in OpenGEM was (a) repackaging the work of people like John Elliott in improving the codebase and (b) the batch and configuration files included with the distribution. I believe FreeGEM had two complete distributions. The one I maintained and another one maintained by Owen Rudge. Owen was first ☺️

My focus was on the question of “how can this install and work as simply as possible for a user” and my answer was based on my limited knowledge of the time. The main points were to install via a simple “unzip with preserved directory structure” and “batch files for setup, running and config.” If I recall correctly, at some point in recent years Liam tried to run OpenGEM on a modern iteration of FreeDOS, and some things no longer worked correctly (some batch files failed?).

OpenGEM 6 (the last complete version) and up to RC 3 of OpenGEM 7 are here:

https://github.com/shanecoughlan/OpenGEM/tree/master/binary

[bitwise]

Nice

I've been thinking of doing something similar, I saw there is an SDL renderer someone wrote.

I'll have to investigate the source, DOSEMU2 has some work that would let people make hybrid DOS/Linux applications which could help this.

I'd like to see this render using native widgets.

[EddieC]

My first GUI

Using GEM on the ICL DRS 300 with Concurrent CP/M-86 (or Concurrent DOS 4.1, can't remember, one of those 2). Loved it, though I was mostly just using it for Ventura Publisher to do our user documentation.