In these days where Microsoft dominates the desktop (and looks set to dominate just about everything else), it has been forgotten that it could easily have been very different. Once upon a time, there was another company that in it's day also dominated the operating system market and was the first company to bring a GUI to the PC. That company was Digital Research which was founded by the late and very great Gary Kildall. Who? You can find out more about him here. Suffice to say that he (and not Bill Gates) practically single-handedly created all the elements that later came together to create the computers that we use everyday. GEM also enjoyed a short revival when it was chosen as the GUI for the Amstrad 1512/1640.

So what is GEM? Short for Graphical Environment Manager, it is a loose interpretation of the the Apple Lisa (later Apple Mac) user interface although Apple thought it was a bit too close and took DR to court forcing them to change it's appearance. It is a program that sits on top of DOS and provides a a Windows style environment including mouse control and desktop elements (such as a clock and calculator) can be multitasked. It provides extra font support and programs can be written to run within GEM and there are many available free to use (such as GEMPaint and GEMWrite). In fact it has many surprisingly familiar elements such as hourglass cursors, dialog boxes, folders, menu's and help. It is also very fast written as it is in the C programming language and running as a DOS application. Here is what it looks like:

Alright so you want to run GEM. Where do you go to get a copy. Well actually, you're spoilt for choice. OpenGEM can be found here and is still being developed. It is a large download but contains just about everything you could want including BASIC programming, a (basic) web browser and office applications. You can download the original DR version (the latest being 3.11) from here as well as some other applications. FreeGem/XM is an interesting project as it is the final version that DR was working on prior to being sold to Novell when all development stopped. Although it is beta, it seems to work very well and shows where the development of GEM was headed. This page contains a long list of projects for download including sound drivers, a scripting language, a spreadsheet and a driver that allows GEM to be viewed in 800x600 (although some apps such as BASIC2 won't work with it). FreeGEM 1.2 (on which OpenGem above is based) can be downloaded here. You can also find MP3 and MIDI players for GEM here with sound drivers. If you are interested, all the source code for GEM is availlable and can be downloaded here. More technical information can also be found here. Finally, there is more software available here including the growbox found on the Atari ST and an icon editor. I think you'll agree that the range of software both original and new and updated is pretty extensive and it is all free to download.