What Happened to Gem?

GEM was an early GUI for the IBM PC and compatibles and, later, the Atari ST, developed by Digital Research, the developers of CP/M and, later, DR-DOS. It was very similar to the Apple Lisa, and Apple saw it as a Lisa/Macintosh ripoff and threatened to sue. While elements of GEM did indeed resemble the Lisa, Digital Research actually hired several developers from Xerox PARC.

DRI demonstrated the 8086 version of GEM at COMDEX in 1984, and shipped it on 28 February 1985, beating Windows 1.0 to market by nearly 9 months. However, the lack of speed and lack of software pretty much doomed GEM on the PC. Apple pressured DRI to remove some of the user elements, making GEM less elegant to use. DRI settled out of court and complied, making the PC version unnecessarily clunky.

Windows didn’t do much better until version 3 in 1990. But DRI discontinued GEM in 1988. By 1990, a perfect storm happened: PCs fast enough to run Windows existed (386 CPUs), and Windows got to be good enough for people to want to use it. Microsoft also had OEM agreements with all of the major PC makers, while GEM only came with PCs from Amstrad and Atari.

In the meantime, GEM survived on the Atari ST. With an 8 MHz Motorola 68000, speed wasn’t a concern. Since GEM was the default environment for the ST, available software was less of an issue. However, software piracy was common on the ST, making developers less enthusiastic. By the early 1990s, developing for PCs running Windows was more profitable.

GEM lived on for several years as a graphical runtime library for DOS, most famously used by Ventura Publisher. Caldera eventually released GEM as open source under the GNU GPL in 1999, resulting in FreeGEM and OpenGEM, though active development ceased around 2008. Today, GEM remains a fascinating piece of computing history and part of Gary Kildall’s legacy.