History of the Gem Desktop Environment
Sometime in 1988, the keyboard of my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K was finally broken beyond repair, and I asked my parents for a 128K version of the same computer. Instead, they surprised me with an Atari 520 ST. It was my first real-world experience with a graphical desktop environment, complete with windows, icons, and a mouse. 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,