Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!ames!amdahl!nsc!voder!apple!landon
From: landon@apple.UUCP (Landon Dyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: GEMDOS History
Message-ID: <7340@apple.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 88 03:14:35 GMT
References: <2697@dadla.TEK.COM> <1988Jan24.012514.26587@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <3005@drivax.UUCP>
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, USA
Lines: 55

> And we already had an 'okay' 68000 operating system, CP/M-68K, and we were
> (then) working on a multitasking, multiuser version of the same called
> "CDOS/68K". But GEM ran only on MS-DOS machines, and sorta depended on that
> file structure. Hmmm. So we considered changing GEM...

Actually, CDOS was DRI's "black hole" project.  It kept eating manpower,
and a lotta people wanted off.  This is relevant to:

> But then a systems programmer said that _he_ could write a new operating
> system in a month that would look just like MS-DOS from a functional
> standpoint, and would be great and perfect and peachy-keen. And he did -
> pretty much alone. And since Atari was in such a hurry, they took what we
> had before all the horrid problems in it cropped up.

The mists of history part...

GEMDOS was originally written by Jason "Born to Code" Loveman, a
programmer on DRI's CDOS effort.  So sick of working on file systems
during the day, he went home at night to spend time writing his own
file system on his Compac.  HE did it HIS way.

CP/M-68K was "okay", but that didn't mean stellar.  That means we were
looking for just about any alternative (real folders sure sounded
better than 16 user areas, though we didn't know about the 40-folder
limit at the time).

So we did a port of GEMDOS for January 1984 CES; it was in ROM at the
show, though it wasn't pretty, and it was part of the reason we didn't
let anyone touch the very first six working STs.  Over the next few
months GEMDOS gradually got more solid.  We made a disk release of the
system in June of 1984, though we weren't too happy about it.

The next five months before the first ROM release saw little
improvement in the file system.  DRI had fired Jason, and some new
people at DRI were struggling valiantly with his idiosyncratic
brain-child.  We saw few updates from DRI, though we squashed quite
a few bugs on our own.

My favorite line to describe the state of GEMDOS (and TOS in general)
is still Han Solo's from The Empire Strikes Back:

	"Whew!  And I thought they smelled bad ... on the outside!"

> And later we fixed all those problems and then forgot about it. I don't think
> there's anyone here still working on GEMDOS.

DRI did not fix "all those problems."  No one has (unless it's Allan Pratt).
It is very clear (though not very interesting, now) that DRI has abandonded
GEMDOS.  Probably just as well...


-Landon
-- 

I speak for me.