[GEM Development] DR operating systems

[Ben A L Jemmett]

[Let's see if this gets through this time -- after 14 years I've had to
change my e-mail address, argh!]

>   GEM/XM is a version of GEM that can multitask DOS applications, that 
> forked off from GEM proper somewhere between GEM/2 and GEM/3. XM/GEM I 
> haven't seen, but there were vague rumours about versions of GEM that 
> ran on UNIX or
> OS/2 rather than DOS, and it's possible that refers to one of them.

XM/GEM doesn't ring any bells (the /XM suffix was used on several products
-- to signify "Expanded Memory" perhaps? -- but I've never seen it used as a
prefix).  However, there are references in the wild to X/GEM, which
apparently ran under FlexOS.  I'm not sure how it differed from the GEM we
know -- FlexOS was a protected-mode OS I think so maybe X/GEM supports
marshalling between address spaces?  (Just a guess!)
http://www.abakion.de/flexos.htm seems to describe FlexOS's lineage and
mentions X/GEM as a subsystem.

A bit of digging turned up
http://www.faqs.org/copyright/multiuser-dos-dr-net-system-builders-kit-relea
se-212/ -- I'm not quite sure how to interpret it, but it lists "X/GEM for
FlexOS, release 1.0" as a separate entity from "FlexOS 286" and "FlexOS
386".  Perhaps that means it was sold separately, or maybe just that it came
with its own manual/disk set/etc.

http://www.abakion.de/Download/download.html has a screenshot of XBENCH -
"X/GEM Benchmarks" -- my schoolboy German is too rusty to judge whether any
of the links on that page lead to interesting information about X/GEM
itself, but that should not pose much problem for Dr. Kasten!

One presumes that IBM don't include X/GEM in the current 4690 OS!  It would
be highly amusing to be wrong, though.

Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
http://flatpack.microwavepizza.co.uk/