[OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL revisited again)

Ned Konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Thu Nov 1 16:52:45 UTC 2001


On Thursday 01 November 2001 08:29 am, Stephen Pair wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer!  Now I'm curious how deep the connections (if
> any) between DRI, GEM, Atari, and PARC may have been...

Apparently very deep. From http://xeroxstar.tripod.com/ :

When Xerox PARC was developing the first GUI, as seen on the 8010, Lee Jay 
Lorenzen was a key member of the team. He was later hired by Digital Research 
Inc., where he worked on a GUI he wanted to call Crystal (after an IBM 
project at the time, called Glass). Since Crystal was already trademarked, 
the project was renamed Gem. The acronym GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) 
came later. Lee wrote the vast majority of GEM/1 following his designs from 
the Xerox closely. In fact, his expertise writing first the Xerox system and 
later GEM allowed him to walk away from DRI and create a smaller cut-down 
version for his company, Ventura. An exchange happened between DRI and Gary 
Kildall at the Atari Grass Valley research center. Gary was given a VAX 
11/750 in exchange for the development of CP/M 68K and GEM, which became TOS 
for the Atari ST line. GEM was also developed for early DOS computers. In 
fact, Elixir Desktop was built on top of the final version of GEM, version 3.

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com




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