[GEM Development] Talking of interesting screenshots...

[John Elliott]

: Anybody know how much engineering effort the OEMs contributed to these 
: versions of GEM?  

  The Apricot F1 driver - and the Master 512 driver - have Digital Research
copyright messages. The Apricot utilities (CONFIG.APP / GEMDISK.APP) have
ACT copyright messages.

: I presume DRI did the bulk of the work on GEM itself 
: (although I doubt much was necessary, since these machines are x86/68k based 
: it's mainly a case of altering the OS bindings?)

  The Apricots run MS-DOS (or Concurrent DOS), so there's no need to change
the OS bindings - just the hardware drivers.

: but would they have also 
: written the drivers and/or underlying OS?  ISTR they wrote the driver for 
: Amstrad's 16-colour CGA, and of course they provided DOS Plus to several 
: OEMs and GEMDOS to Atari.

  The Logo boot disc for the F1 contains Personal CP/M-86 3.3, which has 
FAT filesystem support but (unlike DOS Plus) no DOS emulator. It also
contains a version of Logo that has been compiled for the F1. All of these
only contain DRI copyright messages. 

: >  A quick Google failed to turn up anything about ICL systems that run GEM.
: 
: Hmm, this is from the September 85 article? 

  February 1985.

: I wonder if this is the ICL 
: project that had some connection to the 'real' MS-DOS 4?  ISTR Larry 
: Osterman mentioned on his blog that ICL were interested in that.  If so, it 
: brings up some very interesting possibilities.

<http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?selm=329718.12549.14477%40kcbbs.gen.nz>
suggests that this was the ICL DRS 300 running Concurrent DOS (though I'm
not sure of dates; the ICL Quattro dates from 1985 and also ran Concurrent).
Larry Osterman's blog says that MS-DOS 4.1 ran on the ICL DRS PWS, and that 
this was in 1986. 

-- 
John Elliott