History of the GEM desktop environment

The 1980s saw a flurry of graphical user interfaces pop up, almost all of them in some way made by people who got to see the work done by Xerox. Today’s topic is no exception – GEM was developed by Lee Jay Lorenzen, who worked at Xerox and wished to create a cheaper, less resource-intensive alternative to the Xerox Star, which he got to do at DRI after leaving Xerox. His work was then shown off to Atari, who were interested in using it.

The entire situation was pretty hectic for a while: DRI’s graphics group worked on the PC version of GEM on MS-DOS; Atari developers were porting it to Apple Lisas running CP/M-68K; and Loveman was building GEMDOS. Against all odds, they succeeded. The operating system for Atari ST consisting of GEM running on top of GEMDOS was named TOS which simply meant “the operating system”, although many believed “T” actually stood for “Tramiel”.

Atari 520 ST, soon nicknamed “Jackintosh”, was introduced at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and became an immediate hit. GEM ran smoothly on the powerful ST’s hardware, and there were no clones to worry about. Atari developed its branch of GEM independently of Digital Research until 1993, when the Atari ST line of computers was discontinued.
↫ Nemanja Trifunovic at Programming at the right level

Other than through articles like these and the occasional virtual machine, I have no experience with the various failed graphical user interfaces of the 1980s, since I was too young at the time. Even from the current day, though, it’s easy to see how all of them can be traced back directly to the work done at Xerox, and just how much we owe to the people working there at the time.

Now that the technology industry is as massive as it is, with the stakes being so high, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a place like Xerox PARC ever again. Everything is secretive now, and if a line of research doesn’t obviously lead to massive short-term gains, it’s canned before it even starts. The golden age of wild, random computer research without a profit motive is clearly behind us, and that’s sad.