I can't say I'm wild about a world where Digital Research won. When they were dominant with CP/M, the tools and documentation were bad to the point where most machines had Z80 processors and DR only provided an 8080 assembler, so you had to DB significant bits of code to get the missing opcodes. Developing RSXs to access bank-switched memory under CP/M 3 could have been so much easier with a few examples and perhaps debugging tools. MS/DOS was just so much easier.
I remember using a Z80 assembler on a CP/M 1.x machine, way back when. If it wasn't by DRI could it possibly have been (shock, horror) Microsoft??? We did have a Microsoft Fortran compiler, which was crap, but that was mostly down to being floppy disk based.
Not trying to be funny, I used the assembler a lot, but I really can't remember who supplied it.
Oh, just had a thought - this was on Research Machines 380Zs, so perhaps it was Research Machines home-grown one?
Apple sued DRI, which resulted in the crippling of GEM, the glaring one I remember were static windows. You heard that right, windows were not resizable but had fixed screen locations in the PC version.
Thankfully Atari licensed GEM for their 68000 machines before the lawsuit, and wasn't affected by these changes. The Atari ST (Sixteen/Thirtytwo) was very Mac like at the time. It even ran the Mac OS from Apple ROMs (Spectre 128 and Aladin) on its much cheaper hardware.
> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development
Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time.
The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master.
Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.
I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST.
WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly
Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.
Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.
WordPerfect beat them all.
Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
I've been on a bit of a rabbit hole with Digital Research in the last few days, specifically because I am utterly fascinated with Concurrent DOS.
I played with Concurrent DOS (and later MultiUser DOS) in PCem and I was utterly amazed. I hadn't realized that there was a preemptive multitasking operating system available to consumers as early as the mid 80's outside of AmigaOS.
I read the Wikipedia and I kind of understand why it didn't catch on, but man I kind of wish DRI (and Gary Kildall) was still around. I suspect if they were, they would have continued to make stuff that was at least interesting.
GEM on the PC was... ick... compared to on the Atari ST.
But the problem with GEM on the Atari ST is that in order to cram it into the 192kB ROM they ripped out some goodies like proportional font support which ended up being in an add-on called "GDOS" which was buggy, used up RAM, and most people didn't have it (it came with things like DTP software etc).
In general this was always the problem with the ST. The Tramiels shipped it early and cheap and awesome and I loved mine ... but then didn't pay enough attention to software updates until it was too late and the world had moved on. Jack Tramiel never really understood the value of a good software platform IMHO.
In the early 90s they seemed to learn the error of their ways, hired some talent, and released full multitasking re-entrant versions of TOS/GEM ... but too late.
GEM's architecture itself underneath actually was clearly built for a mulitasking architecture complete with message passing between applications (via AES "mailboxes") etc. It just came down to failure to iterate.
Also the article mentions DR "hiring some people from Xerox" but in fact fails to note that the actual original architect and author of GEM itself was hired from Xerox (Lee Lorenzen). He joined up with DR because he tried to pitch Xerox on porting their Star office concepts down to PC-class hardware and they didn't go for it. His pitch video can actually be seen here:
If I recall it's been done on both (emulator and real hardware).
The original version of GEMDOS (the replacement for DOS or CP/M when running on 68k) was in fact developed on the Lisa as a 68k dev machine [also some Motorola VME dev boards I think?) before actual Atari HW was available. So it's a full circle thing.
Not trying to be funny, I used the assembler a lot, but I really can't remember who supplied it.
Oh, just had a thought - this was on Research Machines 380Zs, so perhaps it was Research Machines home-grown one?
Thankfully Atari licensed GEM for their 68000 machines before the lawsuit, and wasn't affected by these changes. The Atari ST (Sixteen/Thirtytwo) was very Mac like at the time. It even ran the Mac OS from Apple ROMs (Spectre 128 and Aladin) on its much cheaper hardware.
Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time.
The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master.
I think many others may have similar thoughts.
As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.
WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.
Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.
WordPerfect beat them all.
Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php
It ran quite well on my 286.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventura_Publisher
I played with Concurrent DOS (and later MultiUser DOS) in PCem and I was utterly amazed. I hadn't realized that there was a preemptive multitasking operating system available to consumers as early as the mid 80's outside of AmigaOS.
I read the Wikipedia and I kind of understand why it didn't catch on, but man I kind of wish DRI (and Gary Kildall) was still around. I suspect if they were, they would have continued to make stuff that was at least interesting.
But the problem with GEM on the Atari ST is that in order to cram it into the 192kB ROM they ripped out some goodies like proportional font support which ended up being in an add-on called "GDOS" which was buggy, used up RAM, and most people didn't have it (it came with things like DTP software etc).
In general this was always the problem with the ST. The Tramiels shipped it early and cheap and awesome and I loved mine ... but then didn't pay enough attention to software updates until it was too late and the world had moved on. Jack Tramiel never really understood the value of a good software platform IMHO.
In the early 90s they seemed to learn the error of their ways, hired some talent, and released full multitasking re-entrant versions of TOS/GEM ... but too late.
GEM's architecture itself underneath actually was clearly built for a mulitasking architecture complete with message passing between applications (via AES "mailboxes") etc. It just came down to failure to iterate.
Also the article mentions DR "hiring some people from Xerox" but in fact fails to note that the actual original architect and author of GEM itself was hired from Xerox (Lee Lorenzen). He joined up with DR because he tried to pitch Xerox on porting their Star office concepts down to PC-class hardware and they didn't go for it. His pitch video can actually be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMBGRZftS30
Lorzenen later left DR and created Ventura Publisher.
The original version of GEMDOS (the replacement for DOS or CP/M when running on 68k) was in fact developed on the Lisa as a 68k dev machine [also some Motorola VME dev boards I think?) before actual Atari HW was available. So it's a full circle thing.