>>Ever seen GEM? It was written for 68000, but ported to x86 - I've seen it perform on a 8MHz XT equally fast as Win3.1 performed on a 33MHz 386. And it took only 16K of EMS. And had it all.
>
>Yeah, but GEM also didn't do squat. It was a very basic UI engine shell
>with only the most primitive graphics constructs. it didn't even do
>windows (not capital W <s>).

Ten years ago it had some languages which had windows of their own, and, AFAIK, it displayed direc... no, they were called folders on the Atari :), in windows with regular boxes, resizing etc. Had extension mapping, device drivers on the system level, fonts installed etc.Though, I remember it had a limit on four windows open at a time and such. The Atari OS (which included GEM for its GUI) ran from a 192K EPROM.

>If you've ever used a GEM application (like Ventura Publisher) you
>know what I mean... Even early windows versions were a huge improvement
>over what GEM did.

VP? Printed two books and several newspapers in it. It had its quirks, but most of them came from short tradition - in those years, if you made a GUI driven app, you were pretty much on your own. Many things in it would be considered bad design today, and about one half of it could be said to be caused by GEM. BTW, the port of VP to W3.1 was one of the worst apps I tried.

Sure, but "early windows" were no good at the time. Ever tried Windows 2.x? IF (both capital purposedly) GEM had received 10% of effort Windows received, we'd have GEM90 or at least GEM92 with capacities of W95. They were way out ahead of M$ in 1985-89. The rest is history.