Digital Research (DR, GEM)

222 words [ 5 Pictures ] [ 8 Versions ] [ 2 Weblinks ] - Last update: 2023-12-22 Page created: 2006-07-18 [SB]

 


Digital Research

Gary Kildall founded the company Digital Research (DR) in 1976. Many hardware manufacturers licensed CP/M for her computers a year later. In 1981 IBM contact DR to license a suitable operating system. Because of an wrong decision it did not came to a contract so IBM consulted Bill Gates. CP/M failed in the competition with the DOS variant of Microsoft. Digital Research reacted to the market situation and released an MS-DOS compatible CP/M version in 1988. But the business income decreased. Gary Kildall sold Digital Research to Novell for 120 million dollars in July 1991, DR-DOS was renamed to Novell DOS. Gary Kildall dies on July 11th, 1994.

In 1983 Gary Kildall developed thes graphical operating system interface GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) which stood in the beginning in competition to Microsoft Windows 3.x. However, Windows gained more and more acceptance on the market.

In July 1996 Caldera buys the DRI technology of Novell with all rights, Novell DOS is called OpenDOS now. Caldera published the source code for DR-DOS in September 1996 and GEM, Caldera hived off the operating system division in 1998 to the subsidiary firm Lineo which was called Caldera Thin Clients Inc. before. The marketed embedded Linux Embedix which is based on OpenLinux. DeviceLogics takes on all DR-DOS sources and rights in October 2002.

 


Screenshots

Digital Research (DR, GEM) screenshot 1Digital Research (DR, GEM) screenshot 2Digital Research (DR, GEM) screenshot 3Digital Research (DR, GEM) screenshot 4
3.2.1 - OpenGEM Desktop3.2.1 - OpenGEM version3.2.1 - Word processing3.2.1 - GEM desktop Publisher
Digital Research (DR, GEM) screenshot 5
3.2.1 - OpenGEM desktop menu

Versions

Date - Version
1983 - GEM released, Graphical Environment Manager
1985 - PC-GEM was introduced, DOS based GUI
1989 - PC-GEM 3.0
2002, July - OpenGEM 1.0.0
2002, Aug. - OpenGEM 1.1.0
2002, Sept. - OpenGEM 1.2.0
2003, May - OpenGEM 2.0.0
2003, June - OpenGEM 2.1.0

Weblinks

[ Digital Research ][ DR-DOS ]