Felt pretty advanced compared to BBC computer!
My dad used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot (I guess that it was v2.2 or so in the Amstrad).
Unfortunately, it was bought by Xerox in 1990-ish, with development slowing from that point onwards - not helped by a decision to port it to OS/2 ahead of Windows, which turned out to have been a sub-optimal choice once Win3 began to take off.
Its main competitor was Aldus Pagemaker, which was originally a Mac app but became available on Win/386 just as the MacII line was beginning to stagnate. By the time that QuarkXPress finally arrived on the PC in 1992, GEM was long since dead and OS/2 was nearly so. Xerox sold Ventura to Corel in the mid-90s, but it never managed to regain its early popularity.
For example, I only got that computer because getting one with OS/2 was out of my budget, and actually what I really wanted but for several reasons did not buy one, was an Amiga.
Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.
The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)
The original Macintosh was launched January 1984 for $2,495.
The original ST was launched June 1985 for $799.
In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.
Tech was changing faster than now in those days, but even so, the ST was a radical machine. You got a lot for the money.
By September 1984 the 512kB "Fat Mac" was launched but it was more expensive: $3,195.
Yes, Commodore's contemporary Amiga was more impressive, with better graphics, better sound, better multitasking, but it was $1,285 the month after the ST. Also, a single-floppy 512kB Amiga was not much fun. (Like a single-floppy 128kB Mac!) As the ST's OS was in ROM, a single-floppy 512kB machine was actually quite usable. For both a Mac and an Amiga, you really wanted twin floppies, or better still, a hard disk.
I had friends later marveling I missed out on the Macintosh world of the 1980s, but the pricing was not even remotely an option! So dang expensive for a lower middle class kid.
I own a Mac Plus, an Atari 1040ST and an Amiga 1200, but I didn't when they were new.
By 1989 I could just afford to buy myself a 2nd hand Acorn Archimedes A310, an 8MHz 32-bit RISC computer with a 20MB hard disk... but it nothing like it existed for any price in 1984 or 1985.
But I was still at school in 1984, and had to be happy with a 48K ZX Spectrum, a black-and-white portable TV as a display, and a single ZX Microdrive for 85kB of random-access storage.
One of the remarkable things about both the ST and the Amiga was that they had optional add-ons that contained Apple ROM chips, and with them, they could natively boot MacOS and thus run real Mac apps. Both machines' hardware capabilities comfortably exceeded the Mac's, so they could easily run Mac stuff and run it well.
Mac software was often fantastically expensive by Atari and Commodore prices, but even so, this was a very attractive option -- and even with the emulator, the result still cost substantially less than an actual Mac.
Of course, longer term, Apple's pricing means that Apple is alive and well and profitable, while Commodore and Atari collapsed decades ago.
These days we've got a full open source stack of the whole ST OS, from the BIOS up to GEM. Including variants that offer Unix-like multitasking with protected memory, etc.
https://os-projects.eu/sites/default/files/2018-05/freemint....
I had a holiday job/Saturday job at a computer shop that sold these.
I’m surprised to realise I still remember the model numbers and specs.
It also had graphics programs. One for bitmaps and one for vectors, iirc. Me and my friend used to play with those. I don't even remember what else GEM was for. To me it was just a way to launch those editors to draw things and I did not have access to any other graphics applications in DOS until years later.
In the forked and (heavily) maintained form of EmuTOS (GPL, https://emutos.sourceforge.io/)
Or in the from-scratch rewrite in the form of MyAES http://myaes.lutece.net/ (AES ["application environment services"] is the GUI & messaging layer of GEM, sitting along side VDI, the graphics layer)
It does, however, totally omit much of the later development.
When Caldera released the source code, it also released the unfinished GEM/XM, a multitasking version.
http://www.deltasoft.com/news.htm
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/freegemxm-the-open-source-ver...
Another version was X/GEM on FlexOS, DR's multitasking RTOS line, and at least some forms of UNIX.
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/digitalRese...
FlexOS eventually evolved into IBM 4680 OS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexOS#4680_OS
And that into IBM 4690 OS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System
Later sold as Toshiba 4690 OS.
This supports a GUI, which I think is based on X/GEM, as well as TCP/IP networking, app development in Java, and more. It was sold until about 10 years ago.
I don't think I've ever seen a screenshot.
There have also been interesting later FOSS developments.
On the ST platform, TOS + GEM evolved in multiple directions. Some were proprietary, such as MagiC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagiC
A FOSS one became MiNT, which is sometimes called FreeMINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiNT
This became the basis of TOS 4, so Mint is Not TOS was redefined to mean Mint is Now TOS.
There's a complete distro of FreeMINT with the TeraDesk multitasking desktop, called AFROS. It targets a FOSS ST emulator called ARANyM:
https://aranym.github.io/afros.html
https://github.com/ragnar76/afros
Some very minimal firmware to emulate just enough of TOS to boot the MINT replacement OS was developed, called EmuTOS.
This eventually grew into a very complete FOSS clone of TOS+GEM, called EmuTOS:
https://emutos.sourceforge.io/
It even supports some Amiga hardware now!
There's a 4min demo here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kYr5ftxyTA
EmuTOS went from a stub ROM that just reproduced something analagous to the kernel of MS-DOS to a full graphical OS, using the PC GEM source code that Caldera made GPL.
So there is a lovely full circle here, where the ST version continued for years after Windows killed off the PC version, but then the PC version got open-sourced and was used to revive and modernise the ST version in the 21st century.
There's been a lot more GEM-related development in the last decade or two than you'd expect. This makes me happy.
bananaflag•4mo ago
teddyh•4mo ago