How Apple Ruined GEM - And Nearly Windows, Too!

[@sunspot42]

Apple avoided suing Atari in part because Atari had a *lot* of patents of their own, and you did not want to get into a patent war with Jack Tramiel. If the ST had been more-successful Apple probably would have had a go at them. And they probably would have regretted it.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Very good point. Tramiel was ruthless and I'm sure would have taken on Apple without a second thought!

[@serqetry]

Yeah it doesn't sound very plausible that Apple chose not to sue Atari only because the ST's success was below a certain threshold. The ST actually started out really strong, and I remember Apple did take action against the company that made the Magic Sac cartridge that let you run MacOS ROMs on the ST... certainly that was worth their time even less if the ST's sales weren't enough to concern them. There was probably just too much to lose taking on Atari directly.

[@bobweiram6321]

@@ctrlaltreesIn the end, the company with the deepest pockets usually wins.

[@bobweiram6321]

Apple most likely didn't sue Atari because they licensed GEM from Digital Research. No business worth their salt would sign a licensing deal without liability protection from the licensor. Apple would have to sue Digital Research again, but the case had already been settled. As for the Amiga, the UI wasn't close enough copy of the Macintosh. Xerox had the patent on the GUI, but Apple added their own special touches they like the trash can they patented. Microsoft's waste basket was a clear knock off of the Mac as well as a few other features.

[@hblaub]

Steve Jobs even worked once at Atari, so maybe he had still some respect for them - or saw them as minor competitor (while MS-DOS ate his lunch).

[@elmariachi5133]

Jobs was good at suing others for using ideas he had taken from others before.

[@scottfranco1962]

The Disney school...

[@oscodains]

Gary Kildall & his team is really the reason behind computers as they exist today, much more worthy of attention than Jobs imo. The ethical standards Gary held were far above anyone else. Even funding Computer Chronicles when Jobs said along the lines of “why would I pay to show my competitors alongside my products?”

[@kasimirdenhertog3516]

I agree, he also came up with the BIOS, something still very significant for computers.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Note that the CP/M idea of a “BIOS” was the part that held the device drivers. The ROM “BIOS” in the IBM PC was something quite different.

[@tithund]

Well it enables the connection between the os and the hard disk interface, as well as all the other integrated components, so it seems like it's still kind of a low level driver, with a settings menu.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

The “ROM BIOS” is not used as a device-driver layer by any OS more recent than OS/2.

[@DarkSideofSynth]

Good people and big business hardly ever get along. The psychopaths are revered and remembered as they reach the top, while the 'nice guys' who really did the hard work, and revolutionised the world are overshadowed and forgotten.

[@vwestlife]

The first GUI on a personal computer was actually from neither Apple nor Microsoft; it was VisiOn, by VisiCorp (makers of VisiCalc), for the IBM PC. Bill Gates saw a demo of it at COMDEX in 1982 and as soon as he got back to Redmond he demanded that Microsoft start working on what became Windows. Unfortunately, VisiOn was unsuccessful, because it required 512K of RAM, a hard drive, and a mouse, something very few PC users had at the time.

[@daishi5571]

If a tree falls if the forest but nobody is around to hear, does it make a sound... lol

[@BruceStephan]

WRONG . Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates witnessed a XEROX project that Steve Jobs stole from . His Mac is a ripoff of XEROX from the late 70s . Google it .

[@cappaculla]

Yawn.... Dude your boring, quoting frikkin wiki docs... Back to your basement and play with your CRTS

[@LemSportsinterviews]

i read this comment in your voice. love you and your stuff. you and New England Wildlife and More are my favorites on the site; you have the same sort of cadence in your voice and it's very relaxing. big kisses!

[@StinkyCatFarts]

IBWho?

[@GoatTheGoat]

It is hard to believe Gary Kildall let Apple steal his GUI lunch without a fight after Microsoft stole his OS lunch a decade earlier.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Poor old Gary. He's worthy of a whole documentary in and of himself. Really interesting guy.

[@bazza5699]

@@ctrlaltrees yeah, he did it all and got totally shafted.. poor guy..

[@GoatTheGoat]

@@ctrlaltrees Yes. The histories of Digital Research and Gary Kildall are a gold mine of great stories from the PC golden age. Usually people just tell the story how he lost the IBM PC OS deal because he was out flying his airplane and leave it at that. But there is a lot more interesting stories from Kildall's life. Right up to how he died after being attacked for wearing the wrong color in a biker bar.

[@JayRCela]

my understanding is that Gary was an extremely laid back kinda guy, and just lost track of priorities.

[@techdistractions]

@@ctrlaltrees computer chronicles did a special on him that is worth a view 👍

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

Well, Bill Atkinson at Apple _did_ invent the pull-down menu bar, double-click, selection lasso and -overlapping- *clipping* windows. -Overlapping- window *clipping* came about because Atkinson mistakenly _thought_ that Xerox' system already had it ... Icons on the desktop was _not_ an Apple invention though: Xerox _did_ have _that_ . (Edited.)

[@CommonSense-hy2sn]

Didn't Atkinson copied overlapping windows from a Xerox GUI concept demo? I wonder if Visi On already had overlapping windows at comdex 1982, the final product in 1983 has it.

[@DevilishDesign]

@@CommonSense-hy2sn The Xerox system could do overlapping windows but the key thing was, it had to redraw the entire display if a window / menu moved. Atkinson implemented clipping, where the display only redrew the sections that were now visible after a window move / close. Apple also done this in software whereas Xerox had done most of this kind of stuff in hardware. I think it's unfair to say Apple copied Xerox. More like they were influenced by what they saw at Xerox.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Specifically, Bill Atkinson invented (and patented) an efficient scheme to represent nonrectangular regions of pixels, that could have holes in them or even consist of multiple discontiguous parts. The QuickDraw graphics in the Mac (and I presume the Lisa before it) made heavy use of these “regions” for clipping and also as drawing (filling/stroking) objects in their own right. Since the patent was filed in 1982, I think it had expired by 2002.

[@paul_boddie]

@@DevilishDesign A lot of this got litigated - literally - in the Apple vs. Microsoft case, as I understand it. Certainly, I have come across correspondence between lawyers and other parties with regard to prior art, specifically related to the PERQ window system and indicating that Three Rivers demonstrated an overlapping window manager in 1979 and 1980 at SIGGRAPH. I also vaguely recall a story, perhaps told by one of the Bell Labs people (since they were also doing graphical user interfaces), about some kind of animation in a window that could be partially concealed and revealed by other windows and yet updated in an optimised fashion. It isn't unusual, then, that a system would issue a bunch of redraw events to applications in order to implement that kind of update regime. I remember it well from Acorn's RISC OS, and I'm pretty sure things like Xlib do the same. As always in technology, a lot of people tend to find themselves doing a lot of the same things at around the same time, but there is always someone who wants to have ownership of it all. The Apple lawsuit had a chilling effect on the industry, and then after they lost, we had to spend the 1990s arguing with people going on about Fitts' Law. A decade that Apple might not have completed had Microsoft not needed some kind of competitive figleaf and bailed Apple out.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Very interesting, thanks for the info. There was certainly a lot of cross-pollination going on at the time and it's a very complex story. Hopefully this overview inspires people to go out and do some further reading into the details. 🙂

[@CommonSense-hy2sn]

4:20 According to Apple CEO Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple was actually really scared of the Amiga and the Workbench team rejected GEOS as a GUI as it was considered too Mac-like and made sure to their own GUI was a clean room implementation without looking at was already on the market. I have a hunch that your source was probably trying to save face as compared to GEM, Apple would have a much more difficult case against Workbench and Commodore. It really sucks how GEM was sabotaged, Visicorp already had their IBM PC GUI, Visi On, out in 1983 which it's self was sabotaged by Microsoft by sort of vapor/paperlaunching Windows the same year.. Really innovative duopoly

[@jandoor2068]

Exactly. The "Commodore was not worth the effort of suing" theory simply does not hold water as Commodore were still the market leader in the mid 80's with the C64 outselling EVERY Apple model combined.

[@desiv1170]

Also, apparently Amiga was pretty by the book on their OS dev. From the book, Commodore - The Amiga Years ---- The Amiga employees were careful not to put themselves at risk of a lawsuit over the GUI. "We started out passing around design docs. The actual implementation was done completely behind the walls so that there was no knowledge of what anyone else had done," says [RJ] Mical. Because of this policy, Amiga did not not receive any infringement lawsuits based on their GUI. "Not a one; not from anyone, ever," says Mical. "I attribute that mostly to the fact that once I decided that I needed to do a user interface, I slammed the door and drew the blinds and invented it completely and entirely on my own. I didn't look at any other computer system through the whole period. We wanted it to be as clean-room as possible." ---

[@FinnGamble]

Workbench was amazing. It was literally ten years ahead of the rest. Unfortunately, they did not include an MMU and only marketed the Amiga as a gaming machine.

[@charlesspringer4709]

@@jandoor2068 Outselling is not outgrossing. The Apple II was still making billions and it financed the Mac effort and several years of Mac growth.

[@MistaMaddog247]

Sorry but Jobs was already out of Apple in 1985 when John Scully took over and started suing DRI and Microsoft for having any type of GUI. Scully not only drove Jobs out of Apple but started selling Macs for corporate markets instead of "rest of us"...hence the lawsuits.

[@antoller3541]

When they think of Apple they think of Jobs. Yup the eighties were about the corporate market. Ataris and Coomodores were for kids. Vision GEM with Ventura publisher was pretty good but died of boredom. Vision died beacuse Lotus 123 popped up. The judge threw out the Xerox lawsuit against Apple because Xeox could not produce a shrink-wrapped copy of STAR (later Documenter).

[@antoller3541]

Damn i hate spellcheckers.

[@sluxi]

Jobs being gone at that point was already said in the video. That wasn't the beginning of this legal bullying according to it though.

[@xBINARYGODx]

@@sluxi dont bother, a jobs defender is likely brain-rotted in various ways

[@ThisIsPete]

Apple snubbing Atari in the GEM lawsuit battles must have been doubly galling given how many people referred to the ST as the "Jackintosh". But as a commenter said below, chances are it was more likely Apple just didn't want to get into a war with the notoriously ruthless Tramiel. As much as Apple hasn't shied away from many fights over the years, I suspect battling Tramiel would have been orders of magnitude more of a pain in the arse for everyone involved!

[@przemekkobel4874]

Well, the guy survived both Auschwitz and (literally) a meeting with dr Mengele. Imagine fighting someone with such track record.

[@daishi5571]

Steve Jobs "How dare they make a GUI. I stole that fair and square" there are so many instances of SJ being a POS.

[@IrishCarney]

But he didn't steal it. He paid Xerox for it. The Palo Alto engineers were furious but the Xerox corporate brass were clueless

[@daishi5571]

@@IrishCarney This is the twisted BS that allowed SJ to look better than he was. SJ/Apple did not pay Xerox for it, there was no license agreement. What came about was that Xerox allowed SJ to take a look around and that Xerox would buy at a discount shares in Apple (so any money trail was actually from Xerox to Apple, but you are right about Xerox being clueless). This is a typical thing that happens between companies, and I have done it myself. It shows off expertise, with the idea that could turn around into licensing. SJ saw the GUI and thought how could he get that on to the Lisa. He himself had no idea, he was clueless in that area so he had other take a close look at it for implementation. What I found is funny is SJ's outrage that someone would do to him that he had no problem doing to others. To quote him quoting Picasso "'Good artists copy; great artists steal" Apple can't even claim a cleanroom reimplementation of the GUI, but I will say they definitely improved upon it.

[@kirishima638]

@@daishi5571except there was an agreement, on paper between Xerox and Apple, which is why Xerox never sued Apple later. That it was a bad deal for Xerox is irrelevant. Also, Apple didn’t use a single line of code from Xerox and the Lisa and later MacOS was a massive improvement over the Star and that was 100% down to Apple developing the concept. Then Microsoft came along, straight up lifted it from Apple, and called it Windows. No agreements, no deals, no stock. Just straight up theft.

[@bobweiram6321]

⁠@@daishi5571Do you understand how finance and stocks work? They purchased a chunk of Apple well below market rate with a low tax burden. Imagine if I someone sold you a car worth $50K for $5K and you only paid taxes on the $5K. A few years later, Apple's stock shot through the roof, making Xerox a fortune. It's part of the reason Xerox didn't go belly up. Now imagine if the $50K car became a highly desirable collectible worth $500K. Xerox got a killer deal, a wet dream of every business person.

[@slaapliedje]

​@@daishi5571I still maintain that macs would be far better these days if they had not bought NeXT and used BeOS instead. Modern macOS is just so chonky and slow, even on otherwise good hardware.

[@AskJoe]

Brings back a lot of memories, and reminds me to fire up my old Amigas, STs and 1st gen Macs that are sitting in boxes in my garage.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I will admit it, I was one of those Mac fanatics at the time who ridiculed lookalikes like GEM. One of the changes they had to make to appease Apple’s lawyers was have the menus appear just by mousing over their titles, without having to click. I would refer to these as “fall-down” menus!

The "fall-down" of menus is already implemented in GEM 1.x, so it’s not an outcome of the lawsuit.

[@Xoferif]

Yeah, one of my buddies got an Amstrad PC after I'd had my STE for a couple of years. I well remember being truly flabbergasted at how utterly pants the PC version of GEM was!

[@DeadCat-42]

All these patent lawsuits just slowed the development and harmed the consumer. The exact opposite, of the mandate, of the US patent system.

[@winstonsmith478]

BTW, the excellent GFA BASIC on the ST is now available free for Windows as GFA-BASIC 32 for Windows.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

0:25 Rumour has it that TOS always had to be sold, never given away, because “you couldn’t give a TOS”.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Ha!

[@jandoor2068]

Hmmm, I heard a different story. Apparently TOS users are tossers. ;)

[@andymerrett]

@@jandoor2068 Well I was a teenager at the time I had my ST so, really, yeah I was a massive tosser...

[@eformance]

There was an interim pseudo-release of GEM included in DR-DOS as the ViewMax application. You might want to poke around with that.

[@Psy500]

I would think Apple didn't go after Atari and Commodore in that it would give both huge media coverage in the USA. Atari's and Commodore's 16 bit machines outsold the Mac in Europe in the 80s by a significant amount thus had sizable war chests to take Apple to court while also having products that already crushed the Mac in Europe. IBM clones didn't start to take over the home market anywhere till the very end of the 80s when over supply of clone PCs drove prices way down at the low end.

[@lordmikethegreat]

The ST and Amiga thrived in Europe yet languished in North America. I wonder why that was...

[@daishi5571]

@@lordmikethegreat Tax cuts, the US government was handing out tax cuts to both the tech sector and distribution (which is how some companies were able to sell a PC at a loss and still get enough back in taxes to cover that). I read a article that Foundation Imaging (Babylon 5) got a tax cut for switching from the Amiga to PC, so you can bet that was a big initiative for corporations and workers who know nothing about computers buy what they know. Obviously that not the only reason but it's a good chunk.

[@ronny332]

Not seeing Atari and Commodore/Amiga as valid competitors was a crazy but wise view into the future. Especially the Atari was a great platform, not so hardly limited by it's own custom chips, what made it so hard for Commodore to stay compatible but update the machines to higher specs. The Ataris were as basic as the PCs of that time, from the hardware perspective. Theoretically it was easy to replicate them with aftermarket parts. The Amiga, as said, was a different story. Great video!

[@daishi5571]

The ST is/was not easy to replicate because it always had custom chips "GLUE, MMU, DMA, and SHIFTER" (these are not off the shelf parts) while not as complex as the Amiga chipset they were an integral part of it. Take a look at your video chip in whatever computer system you are using, and guess what its "custom" and vastly different to older video chips but it can still run VGA (which was also custom until others basically stole it) it's not that it was custom that's the difficulty, its the investment. Commodore ignored the best asset they had preferring to pad the pockets of investors and upper management. When I say the best asset they had I don't mean the Amiga but MOS (Amiga was the best computer asset they had), the original Amiga chips came out of MOS but by the A1200/A4000 HP was now manufacturing chips for it because MOS couldn't due to a severe lack of investment.

[@DanielHuman1996]

Both GUIs were based on the Xerox Star, which was developed in Palo Alto. However, Xerox lost its patents after US government ruled it a monopoly.

[@paul_boddie]

Are you not thinking of AT&T rather than Xerox? Rees covers the Xerox case against Apple in the video.

[@Dont_Gnaw_on_the_Kitty_1]

Theres also Ashton Tates Framework. A GUI containing word processing, database, spreadsheet and graphics sitting on top of DOS.

[@lordmikethegreat]

And Borland's Quarterdeck, which allowed for multitasking and windowing in text mode with existing DOS programs.

[@dm8579]

Apple hired many people from Xerox, so actually some of the people that ended up in the team HAD invented some of this stuff. Also, you are omitting that Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse and made a demo working with a GUI long before Xerox. ( a fun part is that some people at Xerox PARC had actually started working for Engelbart at ARC/SRI. and Steve Jobs was the only person who ever paid for a license to use the mouse)

[@domramsey]

I used to love playing with GEM Paint on the Amstrad PC1640 my mum had at work. Hadn't seen anything like it before and it was just so cool to me, despite being quite limited.

[@charlesspringer4709]

The Mac team did indeed invent quite a bit of it. Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs were inseparable for quite a stretch. Raskin had been working on GUI ideas and optimal user experience for over a decade. And on the way back from the infamous visit to PARC, they were abuzz with all the things Xerox had wrong. Raskin had seen the original demonstrations of a mouse and sort of gui from SRI by Doug Engelbart in 1968 when IIRC he was teaching at UCSD. Raskin was also the one who proved you can do anything with a single button mouse with a properly designed UI, which is why Macs had single button for so long. Read his book, "The Humane Interface".

[@AdamKlobukowski]

XaAes is not a continuation, but clean room reimplementation. There is also MyAes, and N.Aes (also clean room reimplementations)

[@ctrlaltrees]

Interesting, thanks for the info! I must admit I'd never come across it until researching this video. I suppose it still has its roots in GEM, if only as an inspiration.

[@fluffycritter]

It's a common myth that macOS was a wholesale ripoff of Alto, but in reality Alto had very little resemblance to anything we'd consider a modern GUI, and the original macOS really did add a whole bunch of stuff that we consider to be common/standard in GUIs today. Just because something is obvious in retrospect doesn't mean it was obvious at the time.

[@pigknickers2975]

I bought an Atari ST in 87 having dropped out of CompSci at UEA where I was introduced to Macs. It was so bad, I couldn't believe it. Still shaped my life leading to much success. Bought my firsty actual Mac in 97 and didn't look back.

[@Trusteft]

Ouch indeed. I like how the see you next time bit looked like a threat. :) Great video man, thanks for sharing. :)

[@a1white]

I think GEM probably made problems for themselves by looking so much like the Apple operating system. The GUI looked virtually identical to Apples.

[@RetrogradeScene]

This is a very much a topic high on my interests. Nicely done as always

[@firsteerr]

if you were ever lucky enough to have an acorn Archimedes running risc you would have known how it was the best OS around at the time i still miss it

[@daishi5571]

I would disagree, later versions were better but the early ones were a mess. Teaching kids (and staff) to use it with its 3 button mouse with applications not following a standard was a headache. Apple OS was far easier even if it lacked control. Don't get me wrong the Arc (as a overall system) is what I think was the second best system at the time, with the Mac being way down the list.

[@firsteerr]

@@daishi5571 nothign was standard when ti came out , windows was shit compared to risc and still is

[@hintoninstruments2369]

Too much distraction by "look and feel". GEM had sophisticated features that the PC and Mac still lack, e.g. text templates in dialog boxes. It was simpler to code applications too, you didn't need a team like a Hollywood movie for a desk accessory.

[@lopwidth7343]

God I miss these kind of GUIs. So much easier on the eyes and coherent than modern ones. MultiTOS looks pretty good, not just for its time. The beveled edges and clear crisp visuals with buttons being clearly made and animated just looks better

[@Motocicleiros]

It brings so many memories... I used Ventura Publisher with GEM myself back at the end of the 80s decade and ended up giving up of it in favor of Page Maker with a bizarre version of Windows called "runtime". I really don't expect that you young fellas have a glimpse of what I am talking about, though!

[@rikp]

I used Ventura Publisher on GEM ca. 1990 and the one killer feature of GEM, I thought, was the large scroll bar size which made them easier to grab than any scroll bars on Mac or Win I've used since. I still miss those.

[@ActionRetro]

Wow awesome video! I didn't know half of this drama!

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

I remember thinking how rubbish GEM was on the Amstrad compared to the ST 💪 if only Apple didn’t bother inventing the Mac, what would the world of computing be like? Maybe Atari ST would still exist 😀 and it would have GarageBand and Logic Pro on it !

[@PaulSpades]

"Invent", the Mac? The original mackintosh was nothing new, and never was particularly innovative, though there was always something shiny to sell every generation. And the Atary ST and Amigas were used for music, mostly as sequencers and trackers. Some of that ST software was Creator and Notator - that became Notator Logic. Notator Logic was later ported to win and mac os. Logic Pro comes from ST software. The first Cubase version was also initially released on the ST.

[@realTFM]

Thanks to see modern OS on Amstrad CPC which makes windows obsolete ;-)

[@gibant1]

I first used GEM in 1984 on an Apricot F1 which had a trackball.

[@pigknickers2975]

Forogt about the Apricot, thank you

[@emmgeevideo]

My recollection is that GEM was a "skin", not an OS like Mac OS. Once you clicked on a folder or launched an app, there was nothing special about it. For example you might see a file in a folder that represented a WordStar document, but when you clicked the file and launched WordStar, GEM disappeared. I remember using an early app called GEMDraw that Mac-like (if you'll pardon the expression). HP NewWave was similar, although it was better than GEM IMHO. Apple and Microsoft prevailed in time because they were better products. I'm sure there were some shenanigans and that's good fodder for KZbin channels. But as I happily use my Mac, I'm not shedding any tears for Digital Research.

[@gmc6790]

Apple: Quit stealing stuff that we already stole! Steve Jobs was just a horrible human being. Perfect for Apple.😅

[@10p6]

I loved Gem on the STE/FALCON over the Amigas offering, but the ST version of GEM was slow compared to Apple who wrote direct to hardware with its GUI.

[@zarjesve2]

Well we did not wait to long for screen accelerators on ST though... With this accelerators, ST was quite faster than Mac.

[@PaulSpades]

After how much DR got shafted, I think if Gary would've been more of an asshole, we'd all be running significantly better software today. I wonder what digital research would've come up with as a successor for CP/M and Gem. How would the software landscape look like with DR leading the way, instead of MS playing dirty.

[@RetroTinkerer]

I know I have my bias against Jobs... But damnit as years keep going it's not getting better.

[@jandoor2068]

Lol, seems pretty stupid that Apple didn't consider Commodore a viable target for suing when even as late as the mid 80s Commodore STILL held the majority share of the personal computer market with the C64 outselling all Apple models COMBINED.... me thinks there might be a bit more to the story than that.... ;)

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Well, to be fair, Apple probably had already realized that Commodore executives couldn't find their way out of a brown paper bag and correctly assumed that they would hang themselves at some point further down the road without help from anyone, which they did. It boggles the mind that Commodore just didn't realize what they had in their hands and that we're all using Windows and Mac PCs today instead of Amigas.

[@joojoojeejee6058]

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Amiga was a closed platform, and it would have never reached the momentum of the PC. Besides, by the mid to late 1980s it was already too late, as PCs dominated the business markets. Macs became a quite popular niche basically out of sheer luck (and good marketing, I guess). The company almost went bankrupt in the mid 1990s.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

@@joojoojeejee6058 While I don't disagree with the overall gist of your post, you must recall that the IBM PC only became an "open standard" almost by accident because Compaq and a few others bandied together to reverse engineer the BIOS in order to produce their clones; IBM itself never intended the PC to become "open" and in fact tried, unsuccessfully, to regain the reins later with the PS/2 and MCA. At the time that these things occurred, all platforms were somewhat proprietary - Sun's was the closest to today's definition of an open platform - and thus whichever direction the market would go would be a coin toss, to be honest. The Amiga was uniquely positioned to take the lead given that not only it was literally years ahead of its competitors in terms of multitasking and multimedia capabilities but also because it did it for a fraction of the price, custom chips and all. Even Commodore being hopelessly clueless as it was, noticed this and was starting to go after the business market with things like the A4000 and their ill-fated Amiga port of UNIX SVR4. At some point they would realize that open up the platform would be the way to ensure its survival. But again, as we all know very well Commodore was too stupid to pull this off and the rest is history...

[@jandoor2068]

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 :) Anyone with a basic undertstanding of the underlying hardware of the machines on the market at the time would hae known that due to the simplistic nature and lack of custom hardware that the IBM PC would EASILY be copied by anything with access to 17 cents of hardware buying power..... where as a system as specialised and full of difficult to replicate (especially legally) custom hardware, like the Amiga platform, would be almost impossible to clone.

[@P5ychoFox]

Funny that Xerox got copied.

[@kirishima638]

Funny that you’re wrong.

[@8bvg300]

We had a Amstrad pc 1512, originally running DR DOS and we had GEM. Used to use the paint program and also has a program for making birthday banners/birthday cards... That sort of thing. Then we'd print things out on our Oki Microline. Happy days 😅

[@stephencole9289]

One major usability annoyance on GEM (on the IBM PC anyway) was the mouse was NOT interrupt driven, and so its movement was not very responsive if any other significant cpu activity was going on.

[@hintoninstruments2369]

As opposed to the Lisa where moving the mouse could stop all other activity.

[@cathrynm]

I don't know if Atari ST ever got real printer drivers working for GEM. I had a friend who bought a printer and was told by salesmen ' a driver would come soon', and that never happened.

[@kpbendeguz]

Almost everyone forget to inculde their interpretation of the Xerox GUI -> Apple Mac story, that Apple actualy *paid* for using Xerox's ideas, while everyone else just simply copied the MacOS, that's why Apple sued them.

[@alanmusicman3385]

Paid? No, they didn't. The allowed Xerox to but discounted Apple shares - so it says in Isaacson's biog on SJ.

[@kpbendeguz]

@@alanmusicman3385 Selling stocks below market price *is* payment. For example Elon Musk does not get any cache from Tesla as CEO, only stock buying options if the company reaches certain performance goals under his leadership.

[@balesjo]

I'd forgotten about GEM. There were several graphical programs for DOS and several alternatives early on for early versions of Windows.

[@fermiLiquidDrinker]

This is such a nitpick, but how was PARC infamous? Like, I know about PARC for all of the really cool research they did in physics, math, and computer science.

[@bazza5699]

Gem sits on top of TOS.. so is TOS text driven, like DOS? can it be accessed independently

[@ctrlaltrees]

Not that I'm aware of. Atari very nearly went with DR's CP/M 86k as the underlying OS before changing it at the last minute. It's interesting that TOS never had a text shell / command prompt like other systems at the time, but I suppose Tramiel saw the Mac as his main competition and that didn't have it either.

[@marioromijn1306]

Yes and no, programs can run in a TOS environment that gives a console with a blinky cursor and a library of system calls to manage memory and file handling, but it is up to the individual programs to handle user input. There is not a command line operating system to manage files and start programs from.

[@sunspot42]

TOS is pretty much CPM 68K. When Atari approached DR about providing the OS and windowing shell for the ST they essentially lied to Atari and said that CPM for the 68000 was pretty much complete and they were already porting GEM to run on top of it. When Atari’s programmers showed up at DR after the deal was struck they found out CPM 68K was nowhere near complete and the GEM port was in a terrible state. They scrambled to complete TOS on their own and get GEM ported over to it. Dad Hacker had a great series of posts on this. It’s no longer on the Internet sadly but you can find his posts on the Internet Archive if you search there. The Amiga gets all the attention but they worked on that thing for, what, 3-4 years? Atari pumped out the STs in like a year in a mad scramble. It was a pretty amazing effort for what turned out to be the least-expensive of the 68K systems that - in many ways - was more capable than either the Mac or the Amiga, especially when it came to productivity software. Both of those platforms would eventually catch up and surpass the ST, but it took years and the machines remained considerably more expensive.

[@DTM-Books]

As always, the best movie about the 1980s computer industry is "Pirates of Silicon Valley," which tells the story of Apple and Microsoft so perfectly. It's like The Godfather for computer nerds.

[@programateiro]

Bill Gates & Steve Jobs: smart thieves Gary Kildall: true genius

[@bigalexg]

infamous = having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil. Give em a break, they missed the opportunity to commercialize their revolutionary GUI but they weren't evil. The word you are looking for is "famous"

[@zarjesve2]

One can find Steve Jobs opinion about Amiga on internet. - Before Commodore bought Amiga, Amiga Inc. was desperately looking for buyer for sometime so they present Amiga even to Steve Jobs (among Philips, Sony, Jack Tramiel... and many others)

[@lorensims4846]

The Atari ST was commonly referred to as the "Jackintosh" because of the similarity of the user interface. I really wanted a Macintosh, but I couldn't afford one. I could afford a used Atari ST. I wanted to get used to the whole mouse, windowing interface that had identified the Macintosh. I had really wanted a Lisa but who in the world could have afforded one of those. It's ridiculous that Steve Jobs would sue Digital Research for stealing what Apple had stolen from Xerox Parc.

[@phill6859]

Xerox sold star computers running their graphical ui, but they were expensive. Steve jobs licenced the technology from xerox and hired some of the employees (possibly what made Lisa also not commercially viable).

[@JayRCela]

back in the day I really thought the GEM desktop was going to go mainstream. LOL / that did not happen / thanks for the wonderful video :_)

[@ctrlaltrees]

Real shame it was nipped in the bud when it was, it was very advanced for its time. I guess Digital Research just weren't in a position to fight that particular battle.

[@videooblivion]

So, there are many things that contributed to the downfall of Commodore computer, too. Chief among them was the Cadtrak lawsuit. I can't recall where I read this, but when Cadtrak went after Apple, and they agreed to settle, one of the terms of the settlement was: you go after Commodore next. I will never forgive Apple for that. Yes, I'm aware it's business. I'm aware of the litany of excuses and justifications, thank you. I'm even writing this on a MacBook; but I will never forgive them.

[@ThomTomful]

The Xerox didn't have overlapping windows, didn't offer drag-and-drop, didn't have pull-down menus, etc, etc. Which is not to argue that such things should have been legally protectable, just to note that the video falsely attributes those elements of a GUI.

[@punkerts7711]

Very interesting. I'll always wondered why this version of GEM didn't have over lapping windows. Now I know the dark history. Thankfully they didn't killed the Amiga Workbench. Or did they..? 🤔

[@daishi5571]

Commodore didn't need any outside help to sabotage the Amiga. it was an inside job.

[@aloysiussnailchaser272]

I wouldn’t describe PARC as ‘infamous’. I’d reserve that for Fred West, for instance. PARC would be better described as influential. Something I hope Fred West hasn’t been.

[@markae0]

I had GEM running on my ATARI PC with no hard drive.

[@DJRonnieG]

That was cool when I found out it was running in ROM.... I think there were six ROM chips on the system board for that.

[@joefell5311]

So many shrewd business practices back in the day to be at the top of the computing industry.

[@theserpentes]

IIRC, the IBM when it wanted to challenge Apple in personal computer business, it was about to buy the Atari ST 520 as to become IBM PC. This was told someone in Windows Weekly. But instead of that, IBM wanted the in-house control for the hardware. So the changes that we would have GEM 11 today was plausible...

[@armorgeddon]

That can't be the case though, since the IBM was on the market way before the Atari ST 520 was developed.

[@Eric-lr5ur]

I really appreciate your wokk, bud. Always interesting and accurate. Thanks!

[@ctrlaltrees]

That's very kind of you to say. Thanks for watching!

[@thewkovacs316]

you missed one thing ibm allowed users to install either gem or windows onto their pc's....but they charged far more for gem

[@minekey29348]

Makes you wonder where we would be today if the amiga got a foothold and beat them to market in 84.

[@patrikfloding7985]

GEM was excellent compared to the PC alternatives at the time.

[@blakespot]

And they left the Atari ST's GEM alone.

[@dr_jaymz]

is there a gem desktop we can run in a browser like the many mac / windows / risc os old machines?

[@MKA_NET]

Apple destroyed Gem. Microsoft destroyed GeoWorks.

[@pikuma]

Great video! Thanks.

[@JanRademan]

Kildall was done in by both Gates and Jobs.

[@richardtwyning]

It looks so noddy now, but it was amazing at the time

[@litjellyfish]

Sorry lot of false info here. No the element that Apple took into battle around was not done before at Xerox. People need to stop thinking that the Xerox GUI = first version of Lisa / MacOS. Basically it’s the iconfication and desktop plus windows that Xerox had that was also used in macOS. But then again those things was already present in the mother of all demos so in that sense Xerox was neither the one coming up with them. They just evolved the concept. And Apple evolved it a lot further. Whole GEM basically was just a clone with little to non unique features. On top of it the whole graphical styling was a carbon copy of macOS

[@cptnkrenon]

Apple's gonna Apple... What a shower of 'copper nanotubes'.

[@hadessuk]

I would consider the GEM/Apple/Xerox/Windows explanation you tell a wee bit of a simplification, especially after having read the Digital Antiquarian’s “Doing Windows” series. There are some things that even if not easily protected were Apple’s own, and Xerox certainly didn’t invent overlapping windows, they didn’t have them.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Yes, I admit it's an abbreviated version of what was a very complicated situation at the time. I've bookmarked "Doing Windows" and will have a proper read through it later - thanks for the recommendation. 🙂

[@paul_boddie]

The Xerox Star absolutely did have them, though.

[@MCNOISE666]

Smalltalk on the Alto had overlapping windows.

[@zarjesve2]

Xerox had so much more than overlapping windows... many things we still do not have (and probably won't)!

[@MCNOISE666]

@@zarjesve2 They really were the revolutionaries that no one seems to want to accept or appreciate. PARC is a holy grail of computing, imo. Absolutely awe inspiring.

[@ms-ex8em]

do u know about the Dragon 32 or 64 ?? what about grand prix type in game for the Dragon 32 ?? ive been looking for it for 40 years yes 40 years !!!!!!

[@bombtwenty3867]

AFAIK they also went after Acorn Computers with their range of ABCs Acorn Business Computers

[@paul_boddie]

More details of this would be very interesting indeed. The ABC 300 series was the first machine to publicly demonstrate GEM, although the nature of the software was a secret at the time. I can easily imagine, however, that a brief stroll over to the University of Cambridge to talk to some people might have dug up a bit of prior art. Or, as noted elsewhere in these comments, a chat to a few people at ICL whose PERQ workstation (developed by Three Rivers) had already demonstrated various litigated features. The ABC range was never launched as intended, anyway, including the ABC 300 series, largely because Acorn were in the process of being bailed out and refocused. Acorn's ARM-based operating systems exhibited plenty of graphical user interface features, presumably without any fear of predatory litigation from Apple.

[@GarthBeagle]

Nice overview!

[@jamesdecross1035]

So, where does/did GEOS on the Commodore 8-bit machines fit in? Never released, as supposedly Commodore rejected it, it was developed in Germany before the Apple Macintosh, so it is said.

[@mesterak]

Awesome vid thank you!

[@colt5189]

Does Microsoft still pay Apple a licensing fee for the GUI?

[@liquidsnake6879]

This is a completely false premise, first of all, you can emulate a Xerox Star system from 1981 (the same GUI the Altos had, btw bet you didn't know Xerox had released a GUI based workstation to market before the Lisa, but they did and it's just something history forgot because it sold so poorly) and you'll see for yourself that you can't resize anything and you can't even drag icons, those were features that Apple was indeed the inventor of and weren't present on the Xerox GUI at any point before the release of the Lisa. Likewise the concept of a Desktop and even the bar menu at the top of the screen was invented by Apple and it's all missing from the Xerox GUI that Jobs saw. Thus the main accusation the video makes that Apple sued over things it didn't invent is manifestely false and a simple bit of research proves this, and additionally it's false to claim Gary Kildall was just too spineless to fight it out in court, he didn't because he didn't have a case, neither did Xerox in fact and Apple merely settled with them to shut them up more than anything cause they would've eventually lost in court and in fact some of the lawsuits were thrown out before even going on trial to due the statute of limitations having expired.

[@professor_stevens6784]

Thanks!

[@_Thrackerzod]

"Gooey".

[@thebasketballhistorian3291]

4:51 This is how Windows users today think Linux is like. 😂

[@telengardforever7783]

I wish I got to know Gary Kildall. It's crazy to think of all the things he might have created if he didn't die. OS's are just now catching up to what he accomplished 30+ years ago.

[@airfixer9461]

Great Gem review, loved it...congrats with that :-)

[@Barnaclebeard]

4:50 -- It's pronounced Falcon oh-thirty, like the sixty-eight oh-thirty

[@AquMead]

Hmmm… GEM graphical user interface on Atari early 90s, looks familiar MacOS. 5:45. That mean GUI MacOS is stolen idea from GEM/Atari. 😒

[@Sl1pstreams]

A great deal of the OS X UI was ripped from MultiTOS/TOS 4.0, just as a large chunk of iOS was lifted and shifted from Palm webOS.

[@10p6]

Has apple really invented anything themselves?

[@Rouxenator]

Jobs shoulda gotten a Cobian headache sooner.

[@DeadCat-42]

Apple and Microsoft have held back computing by 20 years.

[@Pedro8k]

Gem could have been so much more it worked well on the Atari st

[@Kilroy_5150]

Steve Jobs was nothing of the 'genius' everyone thought him to be and everything the thief/asshole he really was. He stood on the shoulders of giants (engineers) and took ALL the credit for their work. In other words, Steve Jobs was the biggest "poser" in history. Woz was the real GENIUS. nuff said?

[@ArruVision]

In case of the Mac, I would give more credit to Bill Atkinson, Andy Herzfeldt and the rest of the Macintosh team. They made a number of important contributions including drag and drop, overlapping windows, desk accessories and scroll thumbs that we take for granted ever since.

[@randywatson8347]

Gem was pretty snappy on MS-DOS.