“Caldera has released the source code to the late Digital
Research’s GEM under the GNU Public License. … In the mid-1980s,
it was Windows’ most serious competitor: distinctly Macintosh-like,
blindingly fast, and it ran on DOS. It was a high-quality GUI when
Windows was both unusable and unsellable.”
“…there’s room at the bottom, as nanotechnology advocate K
Eric Drexler observed. DOS is all grown up today; for instance,
DR-DOS supports integrated networking, 32-bit protect-mode
operation, multitasking and multithreading.
GEM adds windowing, a GUI, a CAPI and programmers’ toolkits for
C and TurboPascal. … It can support multitasking. … This is all
you need for a serviceable free thin-client OS. It would be
remotely manageable by editing a few text files, either fetched
from a hidden local share or directly through a Telnet link.”