What happened to GEM? - The Silicon Underground
The Silicon UndergroundDavid L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and moreMenuAboutArchivesHomePrivacy policyRecent CommentsHome » Retro Computing » What happened to GEM? What happened to GEM? Dave Farquhar Retro Computing February 27, 2026February 27, 2026 6 CommentsGEM was an early GUI for the IBM PC and compatibles and, later, the Atari ST, developed by Digital Research, the developers of CP/M and, later, DR-DOS. (Digital Equipment Corporation was a different company.) So what was it, and what happened to GEM?It was very similar to the Apple Lisa, and Apple saw it as a Lisa/Macintosh ripoff and threatened to sue. While elements of GEM did indeed resemble the Lisa, Digital Research actually hired several developers from Xerox PARC.DRI demonstrated the 8086 version of GEM at COMDEX in 1984, and shipped it on 28 February 1985, beating Windows 1.0 to market by nearly 9 months. What happened to GEM? While it never gained really widespread use on PCs, it did find a home on the Atari ST. Atari also shipped it with its IBM-compatible PCs.I read about GEM in the early 1980s, but didn’t actually see it until 1993 when I was in college. When using a friend’s 286, I spied a copy of GEM installed on the hard drive, so I booted it up. Having used a number of 1980s GUIs previously, I had no trouble figuring out GEM. The problem was the lack of software.I’m sure performance was an issue on the pokey 4.77-MHz 8088 CPUs that were common in 1985. On the 286 I was using in 1993, which probably was 10 or 12 MHz, the speed was tolerable.Competing with WindowsThe lack of speed and lack of software pretty much doomed GEM on the PC. Apple pressured DRI to remove some of the user elements, making GEM less elegant to use. DRI settled out of court and complied, making the PC version unnecessarily clunky.Windows didn’t do much better; it was 1990 before Windows, finally in version 3, gained widespread adoption and use. But DRI discontinued GEM in 1988, two years earlier.I don’t think it was coincidence. By 1990, the 486 CPU was out. Few people could afford it, but it existed, and that pushed down the prices of 286 and 386 CPUs. Windows 3.0 was marginal at best on anything but the fastest 286s, but ran fine on the 386, and in 1990, the 386 was reasonably affordable.In 1990 a perfect storm happened: PCs fast enough to run Windows existed, and Windows got to be good enough for people to want to use it.One could argue DRI bowed out too soon. Then again, it’s questionable whether it would have won against Windows anyway. Microsoft was the larger company and had OEM agreements with all of the major PC makers. GEM only came with PCs from Amstrad and Atari, neither of whom were big PC sellers in the United States. They did better in Europe, and that’s why GEM did better in Europe than it did here.Finding refuge in the Atari STIn the meantime, GEM survived on the Atari ST. With an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 as the baseline, speed wasn’t a terrible concern. The 8 MHz 68000 was roughly equivalent to an 8 MHz 80386SX, had such a chip existed. In 1985, it was hot stuff. Hardware-wise, the ST matched up closely to its contemporary Macs and outperformed the PCs of its day, making GEM performance on the ST pretty much a non-issue. And since GEM was the default environment for the ST from the date of its release, available software was less of an issue. Third parties were going to develop for the ST, so they were going to use GEM.Strangely, Apple didn’t sue Atari like they did DRI, and GEM on the Atari remained very Mac-like. I don’t know why Apple didn’t see Atari as a threat. Given what Jack Tramiel had done to the Apple II while heading up Commodore, Apple shouldn’t have wanted him competing with the Mac. Really the only thing that saved Apple from a repeat performance was Tramiel’s lack of understanding that the ST and its operating system needed refinement every few years. By the late 1980s, the ST line looked more dated than it needed to.But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development, and instead, they ported their good ST software to other machines. The ST eventually died due to lack of software as the platform aged. By the early 1990s, developing for PCs running Windows was more profitable, and a sufficiently powerful PC running Windows could match or exceed the ST both in performance and price, something that wasn’t true in 1985.What happened to GEM? Niche usesAnd it’s not entirely fair to declare 8086 GEM’s dying date as 1988. It lived on for several years as a graphical runtime library for DOS, most famously used by Ventura Publisher, one of the more popular desktop publishing packages for PCs.In hindsight, it’s possible to see what went wrong. Had DRI been supplying the underlying operating system to PC makers (call it CP/M, call it DOS, whatever) and convinced one or more of the large US PC makers to bundle GEM with their PCs, and had DRI developed application software that used GEM, it’s easy to imagine an alternate history where GEM thrived the same way Windows did, and perhaps did it a bit sooner, especially if GEM had one or more killer apps and drove demand for ATs that could run it.Linux vendor Caldera ended up owning the old Digital Research intellectual property. Caldera released GEM as open source under the GNU GPL in April 1999, which resulted in the open source projects FreeGEM and OpenGEM. It has not been actively developed since 2008, serving as an example of how open source isn’t a silver bullet. As it stands, GEM is mostly another part of Gary Kildall’s mystique, sadly.If you found this post informative or helpful, please share it!share share save  1 share share  share  5 pocket share email RSS feed Dave FarquharDavid Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.Like this:Like Loading...Related stories by Dave Farquhar← Pentium III launched Feb 28, 1999AMD Am386 released March 2, 1991 → 6 thoughts on “What happened to GEM?”Carl SandersAugust 11, 2012 at 7:49 amPermalinkThanks, great report. ReplyneoFebruary 27, 2026 at 12:27 pmPermalinkwhat about Amiga or Color Computer 3, or Acorn could they get GEM? ReplyJonFebruary 28, 2026 at 3:36 amPermalinkIt would have been a bit pointless to port GEM to either the Amiga or Acorn Archimedes. Both already had their own multitasking operating systems with GUIs. Although both AmigaOS and Acorn’s RISC OS were actually cobbled together in a rush after the original projects to create operating systems for these machines at launch failed! ReplyJD MathewsonFebruary 27, 2026 at 7:44 pmPermalinkI grew up on the ST (Dad was a musician, MIDI was built in, and Calamus and PageStream were both good enough for early desktop publishing) so GEM is always a warm nostalgia hit for me. Thank you for this. ReplytypopeteMarch 2, 2026 at 4:39 amPermalinkStarted the PC desktop publishing with Ventura Publisher in 1987. It worked well for several years until about 1990 when QuarkXPress, on Macs, was the killer app for desktop publishing. There was a story, possibly apocryphal, that IBM was considering GEM for the IBM PC and visited Digital Research and Digital Research made them “wait in the lobby” and pissed IBM off, so that MS-DOS was the operating system chosen. ReplyMikeWMarch 2, 2026 at 12:04 pmPermalinkEmutos I think will run on an amiga. ReplyLeave a ReplyCancel reply This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Popular PostsWhat happened to GEM?What came after 486?Fix your dead SSD with the power cycle methodeMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a memeLionel TW transformerRecent CommentsLuyd Freitas on Magnavox Odyssey 2: 1978-1984Luyd Freitas on Magnavox Odyssey 2: 1978-1984Luyd Freitas on Atari 2600 Pac-Man went on sale March 16, 1982Magnum on IBM PC/XT Model 5160Jon on Amiga 600: The Amiga no one wantedSubscribe via e-mailEnter your e-mail address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by e-mail. Email Address Subscribe Join 206 other subscribersMastodonBlueskyCopyright © 2026 The Silicon Underground. Powered by WordPress. Theme: Accelerate by ThemeGrill. Manage Cookie Consent To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions. Functional Functional Always active The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. Preferences Preferences The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user. Statistics Statistics The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you. Marketing Marketing The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes. Manage optionsManage servicesManage {vendor_count} vendorsRead more about these purposes Accept Deny View preferences Save preferences View preferences{title}{title}{title}Manage consent %d

GEM, short for Graphic Environment Manager, was an early graphical user interface (GUI) developed by Digital Research (DRI), the same company that created CP/M and later DR-DOS. Its creation was a significant moment in the early history of personal computing, aiming to provide a competitive alternative to Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh. The story of GEM’s rise and fall is intertwined with the technological and competitive landscape of the 1980s. Initially, GEM was remarkably similar to the Lisa, prompting Apple to threaten legal action, a move that spurred DRI to incorporate developers from Xerox PARC, bringing valuable GUI design experience to their project. DAVID L. FARQUHAR notes that this collaboration was crucial to GEM’s development, and significantly differentiated it from the Lisa.

GEM was first demonstrated at COMDEX in 1984 and officially launched in February 1985, nearly nine months ahead of Windows 1.0. However, despite this technological head start, GEM never achieved widespread adoption on IBM PCs and compatibles. A key factor in its relative obscurity was its performance on the then-common 4.77-MHz 8088 processors. The slower speeds of these CPUs, combined with a lack of compelling software, proved a significant hurdle. As the 286 processors became more affordable and common around 1990, GEM’s performance became marginally more acceptable, but this was too late to shift the overall trajectory.

Competing directly with Windows was another critical factor. Apple exerted considerable pressure on DRI, pushing them to modify GEM to be less elegant, effectively transforming it into a clunkier experience. This resulted in an unnecessary compromise that further hampered its attractiveness compared to the rapidly developing Windows operating system. The author, DAVID FARQUHAR, indicates that the settlement was “unnecessarily clunky.” Windows, backed by Microsoft’s resources and OEM agreements with major PC manufacturers, steadily gained dominance, establishing a significant lead.

Interestingly, GEM found a more successful home on the Atari ST. The ST’s 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor, roughly equivalent to an 8 MHz 80386SX, was fast enough to deliver a reasonably smooth GEM experience. The ST’s technical specifications were quite competitive relative to its contemporary Macs and outperformed many PCs. A consequence of the ST’s success that helped the popularity of GEM. As DAVID FARQUHAR points out, the ST’s hardware was “hot stuff.”

However, even on the ST, GEM faced challenges. Software piracy was rampant, and less motivation to develop new software arose, which stifled application growth. As the ST platform aged, new PCs running Windows, with their superior performance and price, became increasingly attractive.

Ultimately, GEM’s story is one of near-miss success. It possessed a number of innovative features and a headstart, but systemic issues – performance limitations, software scarcity, and the overwhelming momentum of Windows – conspired against its widespread acceptance. In 1988, DRI discontinued GEM, two years before Windows 3.0 began its ascent.

Even after its demise, GEM continued to have a niche role. It remained as a graphical runtime library for DOS, famously used by Ventura Publisher – a well-regarded desktop publishing application. In 1999, Caldera Software acquired the Digital Research intellectual property and released GEM as open source under the GNU General Public License. This move, while offering a chance for revitalization, ultimately resulted in a fragmented development effort with FreeGEM and OpenGEM. As noted by DAVID FARQUHAR, it “sadly” remains a largely forgotten piece of computing history.