[GEM Development] Talking of interesting screenshots...

[Ben A L Jemmett]

John Elliott wrote:
> 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>.

That's rather interesting, I thought GEM/2 and newer only ever appeared on 
the PC.  Thanks for the Apricot screenshots, BTW; I've seen one of those 
machines running GEM before, but assumed it was IBM-compatible.

Anybody know how much engineering effort the OEMs contributed to these 
versions of GEM?  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?), 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.

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

Hmm, this is from the September 85 article?  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.

Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
(http://www.jemmett-software.co.uk/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)