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

[Shane Gough]

Hi all,

After reading the most recent message from Jose it strikes me that
people are here for very different reasons.

I've become interested in GEM more for nostalgic reasons - I'm
currently running GEM in virtual machines (under Sun's VirtualBox on
Windows and Linux, Parallels on OS/X). GEM was very rare in my
environment, I only ever saw a few installations. Once Windows 3.1
came out it seemed to dissapear altogether. Looking at the
implementation of FreeGEM/OpenGEM is an interesting experience - how
it manages to do what it does in the minimal resources available
(something that wasn't available at the time it was in production
use).

I really can't see any modern situation where GEM would be in anyway
useful as more than an interesting toy. That said, it's a fun
environment to relive your past (or to see where modern GUI's and
systems came from). There are a few interesting projects I'd like to
play with on top of GEM:

1/ An application framework for Object Pascal or C++ (both Turbo
Pascal 5.5 and Turbo C++ 1.01 are available from the Borland Museum
for free download).

2/ An implementation of TinyPy (http://www.tinypy.org) with a IDE for
simple application development with GEM itself. Although TinyPy is a
limited subset of Python that fits into 64K this would still be quite
a push.

3/ I'd like to play around with alternative desktop implementations. I
don't know enough about how the GEM desktop is implemented yet to know
how easy or hard that would be. I'd like to see a more application
oriented rather than file management oriented desktop.

As for the implementation of GEM itself there is one thing I would
like to play with - an implementation of the GEM API for Linux. I
could see a number of single board systems with graphics support
running an instance of GEM rather than X11 as the GUI. Any system that
had kernel framebuffer support could potentially be a suitable host.
All you would need is the Linux kernel, busybox for core utilities and
GEM for the UI. Using a Linux kernel would give you support for
networking, a wide range of file systems and multitasking.

Anyway - read that as my introduction to the list :) If anyone knows
of current projects similar to the ones I've described above please
let me know. I'd be interested in contributing to an existing project
rather than starting a new one.

Regards,
Shane