GoKawiilGEM was an early GUI for the IBM PC and compatibles and, later, the Atari ST, developed by Digital Research, the developers of CP/M and, later, DR-DOS. (Digital Equipment Corporation was a different company.) So what was it, and what happened to GEM?
It was very similar to the Apple Lisa, and Apple saw it as a Lisa/Macintosh ripoff and threatened to sue. While elements of GEM did indeed resemble the Lisa, Digital Research actually hired several developers from Xerox PARC.
DRI demonstrated the 8086 version of GEM at COMDEX in 1984, and shipped it on 28 February 1985, beating Windows 1.0 to market by nearly 9 months.
I read about GEM in the early 1980s, but didn’t actually see it until 1993 when I was in college. When using a friend’s 286, I spied a copy of GEM installed on the hard drive, so I booted it up. Having used a number of 1980s GUIs previously, I had no trouble figuring out GEM. The problem was the lack of software.
I’m sure performance was an issue on the pokey 4.77-MHz 8088 CPUs that were common in 1985. On the 286 I was using in 1993, which probably was 10 or 12 MHz, the speed was tolerable.
Competing with Windows
The lack of speed and lack of software pretty much doomed GEM on the PC. Apple pressured DRI to remove some of the user elements, making GEM less elegant to use. DRI settled out of court and complied, making the PC version unnecessarily clunky.
Windows didn’t do much better; it was 1990 before Windows, finally in version 3, gained widespread adoption and use. But DRI discontinued GEM in 1988, two years earlier.
I don’t think it was coincidence. By 1990, the 486 CPU was out. Few people could afford it, but it existed, and that pushed down the prices of 286 and 386 CPUs. Windows 3.0 was marginal at best on anything but the fastest 286s, but ran fine on the 386, and in 1990, the 386 was reasonably affordable.
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