[GEM Development] More about GEM not going forward... More comments?

[José Emilio Mori Recio]

Hello again. Some comments, specially to Michael Bernstein.

After Michael's message, I'm somewhat confused about the GEMWiki. I believed
it was created in order to help people (specially this list's people) which
would like to begin GEM developing and to provide a useful way to share
information, and that it was a common efort of several people (not only one
person), which means that people felt that there was a need for a wiki.
Maybe things have changed and that's why the primary wiki isn't fixed... but
I don't think we should just let it die, until the freegem.net domain
expires (only eight days from now, by the way, if the whois is correct... I
don't know if Owen is aware of that...). Like Owen, I would like to hear
from its maintainer Rob. And also from Shane Coughlan about OpenGEM 7.

Personally I feel that as long as there's several people involved in the
project, the wiki could be useful, the same way this mailing list is
currently still useful. David Johnson has explained which was his starting
point... a further explanation of that could be very useful in the wiki, for
newcomers: the current documentation, as far as I've read, lacks something
of a "Developing HOWTO".

Talking about what to do with GEM... obviously, nothing related to
day-by-day work and modern PCs. But I have several ideas: making some (very)
old PCs useful again, programming practice, and a "historic work" of
preservation (apart from being a toy, etc.). Also very important, GEM is
connected to FreeDOS, a project still in active development, and both
projects could benefit of one another.

I don't think GEM should evolve into multitasking, higher resolutions or
other "modern" things... running with 640Kb is a "feature", not a problem,
if we consider that it means those old PCs will still be able to run it, and
that's good, I think. Or, if there's such an evolution, a 640Kb-version
should co-exist. Anyway, I'll take a look to Michael's documentation, and
we'll see in the future...

If PC-GEM is really finished, or more precisely, Shane Land announces that
he won't do any further developing/web updating, and/or Rob won't fix the
wiki (really hoping neither of those will happen), maybe people like David
Johnson, Shane Gough and others, also with my help, could coordinate to
create and maintain a wiki and/or a common web which would keep track of all
their/our possible new developing, and to centralize GEM information and
links for the "external" visitor who wants to know something about GEM. As I
said, I can help with the web hosting, MySQL, MediaWiki, eventual HTML/PHP
coding, etc.

Anyway, what I would like is to read news from the maintainers, to really
know what things are like and what we should do next.

Best regards,

//     José Emilio Mori Recio - http://www.gui.uva.es/~jem         \\
|| Administrador Informático, Arzobispado de Valladolid y Archivo  ||
\\ Miembro 088 del Grupo Universitario de Informática, Valladolid  //