Digital Research To Modify GEM

Computers

A New Mac Imitator

By Lou Dolinar
Newsday

October 1, 1985

Among the computer cognoscenti, Digital Research is a name almost as legendary, and as influential, as Apple. Back in the early days of microcomputing, the firm created CP / M, the first universal "operating system" - the means by which a computer coordinates the activities of programs, disk drives, processor chips and the like.

In recent years, though, the firm has been ground under the wheels of the IBM bandwagon and a rival operating system, MS-DOS, from the Microsoft Corp. of Bellevue, Wash. Its successor products, though winning solid reviews among computer specialists, have had little impact in the marketplace. Now though, the firm is staking its future on one of this year's major products, the GEM desktop, which is designed to bring Macintosh-style friendliness to IBM-type machines.

There are more important things at stake here as well. Both Commodore and Atari are risking their corporate futures on Macintosh-style machines. These, along with GEM, incorporate the Macintosh trademarks: a mouse, a small device that rolls around the desktop and acts as a pointer; pull-down menus displaying all available commands; icons, pictures representing various functions of the computer, and windows, which display multiple programs or parts of programs in separate sections of the screen.

The question is, do all those Mac goodies, moved to another computer, guarantee that it will be easy to use? Or is the Mac's ease of use as much a product of the single-minded consistency and clarity of the tiny design team that created it?

Judging from GEM, which substitutes for the user-hostile MS-DOS, and its two companion programs, GEM Write and GEM Paint, we'd lean to the latter explanation: It is too difficult to use to win over the potential Mac buyer and not powerful enough to wean away the hackers who have devoted many months to mastering MS-DOS. Digital Research's programmers seem to have gone about as far as you can go in turning a PC into a Macintosh, but that does not seem far enough. For those of us who believe that there is an indefinable spark of something unique buried in each computer design, GEM is Exhibit A, doomed by the equipment it must work with to be less than great.

Installing the programs, for example, is about as painless as we've ever seen for an MS-DOS computer: Insert one of four disks into your computer and follow the instructions to transfer the whole package over to your hard disk (this is almost mandatory with GEM) and adjust various values to fit your peripherals. Unfortunately, you must also pick up a couple pieces of MS-DOS utilities to make it work; this assumes you know what the utilities are and where to find them. If you can do that, you probably don't need GEM to do your thinking for you. Another symptom of an undistinguished program: Only a few popular brands of printers are supported by the programs - our Prowriter was not - which should deter many potential buyers.

On the plus side, the basic GEM environment makes it somewhat easier to navigate the multiple screens of directories and subdirectories one typically finds on a hard disk with unadulterated MS-DOS. You can flip through various icons representing files, point and click with the mouse, and there they are. Of course, most DOS users, myself included, have pieced together our own quirky ways of organizing this information to accomplish much the same thing.

One element that is surprising - or not surprising, depending on whether you prefer IBM or Apple - is that comparable operations with GEM are much faster than with the Macintosh. The IBM's chip is generally considered a lot slower than the Macintosh's, but the speedy hard disk on our Clone seems to more than make up for it.

Overall, GEM gets an A as an MS-DOS program but a D as a competitor of the Macintosh. Next week we'll look at the two programs that accompany it, Paint and Write, which are fairly straightforward clones of similarly named Macintosh programs.