[GEM Development] Talking of interesting screenshots...

[John Elliott]

: Very interesting indeed! Do you know if GEM existed in forms for many
: systems other than the IBM, Atari and now Apricot F1 systems? I must admit,
: I had never heard of the Apricot F1 before now, but it certainly looks
: interesting!

  The Apricot PC-incompatibles were interesting from a technical standpoint.
In particular, the first ones (PC and Xi) were in many ways what the IBM PC
should have been; they had 3.5" drives rather than 5.25", video RAM at the
bottom of memory rather than the top (so no 640k barrier) and a proper I/O
controller (an 8089) rather than the broken DMA chip in the IBM. They also
had a nice feature whereby the keyboard had an LCD above the 6 function keys,
which could be programmed with captions for what the keys did.
  The next generation was the Portable (codenamed Rascal A) and the F-series
(Rascal C; I don't know what Rascal B would have been). The Portable
included various weird features, such as voice recognition and an infrared
keyboard (so you had to feed the keyboard batteries to do anything with the
PC). The F-series were cut-down desktop versions of the Portable, keeping
the IR keyboard but losing the voice support and most of the support
chipset. There isn't even an interrupt controller; since the support chips
are from the Z80 family, this means the 8086 has to do pretend Z80
instruction fetches to acknowledge interrupts!
  Now, as for other versions, the review I got the picture from says:

# Firm customers at the moment include ACT for its Apricot range, Acorn for
# its ABC 300 business machine and ICL for a 'hush hush' new business
# machine. In addition Atari has announced that it will be taking GEM for
# its new ultra-cheap/high spec business machine. Finally, and predictably,
# DR itself has implemented GEM on the IBM PC.

  There's a bit more on the ABC 310 (like an ABC 300 but with a hard drive)
in the 'Retro' section of the current (April 2005) issue of Personal
Computer World. Apparently it was pretty much a repackaged BBC with a 286
coprocessor, which ran GEM atop "a multitasking version of CP/M" - probably
Concurrent DOS. Acorn went on to make the Master 512, which was a similar
sort of thing from a technical point of view and came with GEM/2; there's a
screenshot at <http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/GreatestFind/512-14Big.html>.

  A quick Google failed to turn up anything about ICL systems that run GEM.

-- 
John Elliott