Lalo Martins writes:
Do you remember GEM? Yes, the cool GUI developed by Digital
Research in the eighties, which you needed for the first few
versions of Ventura Publisher? Well, looks like Caldera just found
this source code hanging around somewhere and decided to release it. The
whole thing is GPLed, and seems to even include a version of DOS
(`GDOS’ – never heard of it).
“The first offering will be the source for GEM itself. This
source is RAW. That means that it doesn’t necessarily compile into
a running program. It will take the efforts of some talented
programmers to clean it up, and turn it into a solid, viable,
operating system. I believe that there are several people out there
who are more than capable of doing this.”
Update: Gene Buckle wrote in with
this:
Ok, first of all Caldera didn’t just recently “find”
the sources. I obtained them from their European Development Center
in 1996 or so with the intent of developing a 32 bit version of
GEM. Due to personal and work issues, the project never got off the
ground. When Caldera closed the EDC late last year, all chances of
GEM ever seeing another commercial release fell to zero. I then
petitioned the powers that be (repeatedly!) to allow me to publish
the GEM and ViewMAX source trees that I had in my possesion.The GDOS is one of the primary components of GEM. It contains
some of the very low level interface code, the main IRQ hook and
the video driver loader. Beyond that I don’t think it did a thing
with fonts since I’m pretty sure the AES handled that The execution
chain is GDOS -> AES -> DESKTOP.If you folks have any other questions, go ahead and email me at
geneb@deltasoft.com.g.
Update: Gene adds:
Due to the _incredible_ load imposed upon the server
the GEM sources are hosted on, I beg of you folks to use one of the
two mirror sites:http://cpm.interfun.net/
or
http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cfs/cpmThanks for the great response everyone!