[GEM Development] The OpenGEM Interviews

[Liam Proven]

Shane M. Coughlan wrote:

> For LIAM

Good $DEITY! Er, hello. [Blush]

> Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm a freelance journalist and IT consultant, with a special interest in
making old or low-end kit useful for underprivileged people and those in
the developing world. I live in south London in England in the United
Kingdom.

There's more about me on:

http://livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lproven

> When did you first come across GEM?

When it was pretty new! I heard about it in the IT press back in the
early 90s, mainly on the Atari ST, but used it first in my first and
second jobs, back in 1988-90 or so. I worked for a dealership that sold
Amstrad computers, so fixing and maintaining Amstrad PC1512 and PC1640
machines was a common job. These were rather strange, nonstandard PC
clones, "interestingly" designed and built to be sold for a very low
price - for the time. They came bundled with MS-DOS 3.1 and Digital
Research DOS+, a weird CP/M-86 based forerunner of DR-DOS.

One weird 'Strad feature was a sort-of-CGA-compatible graphics chip on
the motherboard which could do 640x200 in 4 colours, if I remember
correctly. Virtually nothing supported this graphics mode - except GEM,
so people used it, often just for GEM Paint.

> What interested you in the FreeGEM community?

I always liked GEM as a GUI, both on PCs and on the ST. When I heard
that it had gone open-source, I thought maybe it would come back to
life, so I joined the mailing list.

> What's your favourite version of DR GEM and why?

Later Atari versions, although I've only run them under emulators, such
as the excellent ARAnyM:

http://aranym.sourceforge.net/

By the time of the Falcon, Atari GEM had got to TOS 4 + MultiTOS: a
multitasking GUI OS with a choice of full-featured desktops and a wide
range of applications. It was impressive stuff!

Incidentally, one of the FreeGEM-related things I've done the most work
on and am most proud of is a history of ST GEM versions, since nothing
like that seemed to exist anywhere and there was much argument and
debate over what came when and where. The finished result is here:

http://members.aol.com/liamproven/reference/tos_hist.htm

> What's your biggest gripe with GEM?

That I wish I had the programming skills to contribute more. If I knew
how to bring across more of the neat features of ST GEM to FreeGEM, it
would be really nifty. The main problem with the FreeGEM on the PC is
that it runs under DOS, with all of DOS' restrictions.

> What did you think the future holds for GEM?

Well, there seems to be continuing interest in DOS - developing it and
using it. I reckon FreeGEM is one of the very best DOS GUIs out there
and it's one of the few that's GPL. I only wish that DR-DOS had gone
properly GPL - in some respects, it's still ahead of FreeDOS. While I'm
dreaming, if X/GEM and Flex/OS and Concurrent DOS/386 and so on had gone
GPL as well, there might have been a big, active community of
multitasking GUI-based DOS users even today. Maybe it will come some day
anyway, but DOS is a nearly-forgotten and diminishing skill now and I
don't see that being reversed.

-- 
Liam Proven · http://livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lproven
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com · MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk · Skype: liamproven · ICQ: 73187508