Digital Research's GEM was a GUI for the IBM PC and Atari ST. It beat Windows to market but didn't catch on. Here's what happened to GEM.

Two Stop Bits

GEM was an early PC GUI developed by Digital Research, shipping in February 1985 — nearly nine months before Windows 1.0. Apple sued over its similarity to the Lisa/Mac, forcing DRI to strip features and making the PC version clunky. Lack of software, slow hardware, and Microsoft's OEM dominance killed it on PCs by 1988. GEM found a better home on the Atari ST, where the 68000 CPU made performance acceptable and it shipped as the default environment, but software piracy eventually undermined that platform too. GEM lived on as a runtime for DOS desktop publishing tools like Ventura Publisher. Caldera open-sourced it under the GPL in 1999, spawning FreeGEM and OpenGEM, but development went dormant in 2008 — illustrating that open-sourcing old code doesn't guarantee community revival.

What happened to GEM?