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History of the Gem Desktop Environment

How a gem was cut and then lost

The ST was an amazing machine, not only compared to my poor old “Speccy” and similar cheap home computers, but even to the IBM PC compatibles in my school’s comp-sci lab, which cost at least twice as much. In July 1981, Lee Jay Lorenzen, a recent graduate from Southern Methodist University, began working at Xerox’s Office Products Division in Dallas, Texas. The entire situation was pretty hectic for a while: DRI’s graphics group worked on the PC version of GEM on MS-DOS; Atari developers were porting it to Apple Lisas running CP/M-68K; and Loveman was building GEMDOS.

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