The Atari ST's Gemdos

• lisa-gemdos

  2 22 10.0 Assembly

  GEMDOS for the Apple Lisa

The origin story of the GEM stuff is quite interesting. Lee Lorenzen was an employee at Xerox in Texas, and wanted to get some of the ideas from the Star onto commodity x86 hardware (just prior to IBM PC). He made a prototype, presented it, and it went nowhere. Gary Kildall (DR) then recruited him to come work for them doing basically that. He (Lorenzen) later went off to spin up his own company -- which created Ventura Publisher, which was built on a fork of GEM.

GEM maybe has a bad reputation as a bit of a Mac UI knockoff, but the history is actually deeper than that. Like a lot of things DR did, it got a bit neglected on the market.

Atari Corp also did a bad job of ongoing maintenance of this stuff. At least not until the latest-80s/early 90s when they suddenly started to iterate on it, hired Eric Smith (author of "MiNT" a unixy multitasking kernel that built overtop GEMDOS) to work on the OS, and pushed out proper multitasking versions... for their 68020/030 machines ... but too late.

It'd be cool if Landon Dyer (who is a user here) were to comment on this, as he was on the team that ported all this stuff from x86 to 68k. Unfortunately it looks like his blog where he wrote this up (dadhacker.com) seems to be gone (!?), it was great writing.

I also believe some of the sources from GEMDOS were used as part of the DR-DOS source tree later. All of this is GPL now.

Also interesting, before the ST, the 68k port of GEMDOS was run on Motorola VME 68k machines, but also on the Apple Lisa. The version running on the latter has since been resurrected, and boots:

https://github.com/cheesestraws/lisa-gemdos

Finally, the (GPL'd) EmuTOS source code base basically did all of the heroic work of porting the original DR sources to the Atari ST again, based on the original DR sources. And they have done an amazing job of reproducing Atari/DR's work faithfully.

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

That, and EmuTOS runs lovely on other 68k machines (Amiga, Mac, and Lisa for example) as well as ColdFire machines (the "FireBee" Atari-ish computer, and dev boards). It's a great little 68k/ColdFire operating system that is quite portable and well supported.

EmuTOS running on Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxIytWnqQnU

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