1986: GEM versus WINDOWS - BATTLE of the GUIs | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- Micro Live's Fred Harris considers how daunting computers can be to novice users. He chats to psychologist Professor David Canter, who notes how finding your way around a computer system can be frustrating and unintuitive. Professor Canter visits the Barbican Centre, which proves an excellent metaphor for navigating the endless corridors of unfriendly operating systems.
With the Apple Macintosh proving that computers can be user friendly, Ian McNaught-Davis delves into the sexy but largely unheralded world of GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces). He stages a titanic battle of the GUIs - in the red corner, Paul Bailey of Digital Research demonstrates GEM, while in the blue corner, Microsoft's David Fraser shows off Windows.
Clip taken from Micro Live, originally broadcast on BBC Two, 12 November, 1986.
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wow. these journalists really did their homework. they even mention “mental models”, which is one of the fundamental concepts which influenced oop and guis in the 70ties at xerox parc.
the other is worst, Apple ,what a ridiculous name .. why not pineapple?
Viewers cared more about content than style then, and programme makers felt they had standards to uphold and raise. Compare old documentary series (such as Horizon, Equinox, Arena, The Ascent of Man, Civilisation, The World at War) with most documentaries now. Tbf there are some good ones these days but most is dumbed down, eg pretty much anything on History channel.
“A front end that tries to understand what you’re trying to do, and then helps you to do it…”. Hello MS Clippy.
@@PlasticGeordie
Or Microsoft BOB...
@DdlyHeadshot yeah MS BOB 😂
File under be careful what you wish for.
Lets just pause a moment and think about the work required to ensure all the displays are sync'ed to the TV camera correctly.....
Great point Ian!
its postprocessing of our modern encoder
Back in early 90s I worked on a TV programme that needed to record what was happening on a computer screen. We used hardware that acted as an interface. I remember I was in an editing suite and, when other editors heard we had this interface, they nicked it off us.
I miss the old days of the BBC when informative and entertaining shows like this were made.
What, you mean Strictly Come Dancing is not entertaining?
@@jkingdom3LMAO. Errrmmm no! That's what I call crap TV! I have watched the BBC for about a month in 20 years It's such utter crap. They should of scrapped the licence fees years ago.
@@therealyogibear2k225"Should of"?
@@cholling1 OK, Should have! What are you an English teacher 🤣🤣🤣
What?! You mean all the crappy games shows and celebrity gossip on British TV now isn't as good? I'm shocked.
I think Gem definitely will win this competition. Windows? What a ridiculous name!
The future of computing lies on GEM.
tbh, that was what happened. A lot more people used GEM than Windows, then Windows 3.0 happened and Gem was not being updated so quick, then computers started have more horsepower... and eventually Windows catched up. But trust me, if you where in the early or mid 80s you wouldn't touch Windows with a stick.
@@Vlad-1986 "But trust me, if you where in the early or mid 80s you wouldn't touch Windows with a stick."
We are now in 2024 and i wouldnt touch windows with a stick :D
@@salatwurzel-4388 We are both in the same page :P
@@Vlad-1986 Same thing happened to Amiga.
1:14 I'm curious about the story of the old lady in Holland who got lost in a hypermarket for 3 days.
Oh, dear. What can the matter be? Three old ladies locked in the lavatory. They were there from Monday to Saturday. Nobody knew they were there.
ChatGPT has this on the matter:
"The story of an old lady in Holland getting lost in a supermarket for three days in 1986 seems to be more of an urban legend than a verified news event. Despite numerous retellings, there is no concrete evidence or reputable source confirming such an incident occurred.
The story often circulates in different forms, usually involving a confusion with automatic doors or a maze-like supermarket layout, leading to the elderly person being trapped without anyone noticing. However, searching through historical archives, newspapers, and other records from 1986 yields no verifiable reports of such an event."
@@richcolour ChatGPT is not a source. Just because a news story from 1986 isn't readily available to a frequently-hallucinating chatbot trawling Google doesn't make it a myth. Of course it could be a myth, but drawing that conclusion would require actual research.
@@richcolour I believe "apocryphal" is the word you are looking for.
I did not even know we had hypermarkets in NL... I associate hypermarkets with hymermarchés in France where I can understand you can get lost in one easily. Every aisle looks like any other. Maybe it was the Makro...not really a normal super- or hypermarket but a wholesale business, and it was quite a thing back in the 1980s. Maybe she had some form of dementia, but even then...the Makro is not that big.
This was well researched and presented while being very accessible to a non-technical audience. Taking such a high-level view of the psychology and human factors of GUI design at this embryonic phase of the technology was impressive!
If you want to see the actual "embryonic" state of the GUI, search for "mother of all demos with Doug Engelbart" on youtube. Doug demos mouse-driven text editing, formatting, copy/paste etc. all from a video chat...in 1968!
His work influenced the Xerox PARC Alto, which in turn was used by Apple to create the Lisa and later the iconic Macintosh. Yes, the copier company Xerox were the first real pioneers of the modern GUI. They formed a think tank at PARC in the 1970s to create the "office of the future." By all accounts, they succeeded. Their GUI was in some ways more polished than most that were developed in the 80s. Predating the microprocessor revolution, the primitive technology at the time required to actually make all of it work left an eye-watering price tag that was far to painful for most companies to swallow.
The only real failure of the PARC project was that it was born far too soon. The concepts that Xerox developed were pared down to work on simpler, but more affordable, microcomputers of the 80s. As they alluded to in this video, they needed more sophisticated video cards to catch up to what Xerox had achieved a decade before...at a far reasonable price.
Ian Mcnaught Davis-the go to man when talking about computer programmes on the BBC in the 1980s.
Just don't mention computer gaming to him. He hated that computers were being used for such things and thought it was a fad. There is a clip somewhere of him saying something like this. Boy was he wrong!
@@rick12373 All of his BBC Live and Micro programmes from the '80s are on BBC iPlayer.
Never touched a game since about 20, so in my case yes...
@@amigachris I would say you are probably in the minority there. Nothing wrong with that of course.
Fred Harris has such a wonderful sounding voice.
To me Fred Harris had a soothing British voice, like Gonzos from the Muppet Show but far less grating though.
Ian had an equally commanding voice.
Ragtime😀
@@user-ub1dz8js7s You think Gonzo was both soothing and grating? You muppet.
As a massive fan of The Burkiss Way, it’s nice to see Fred Harris.
Isn't he a panic.
Chocka Bloke checking in.
LOL reminds me of the old joke "Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?". I wish he had done Prompt $p$g... ;)
Also the time of Guru Meditations. They were meditating a lot on that other system that many gamers had...
Just the other day I was clearing out some old boxes and I came across a 'Me and my Micro' pamphlet which shipped with my Acorn Electron, back in the day. Fred Harris is featured on the front cover!
Ran into Ian and Fred at some BBC Micro exhibition shows, nice guys and really interested in the work we were doing on PageMaker.
Great to see Ian McNaught-Davis, a fabulous mountaineer and presenter.
Bad move losing Command Line Interfaces. And coming down from the trees. 😁👍
They're not lost, you can still access them on any half-decent OS.
@@giulianomarco Maybe we should never have left the oceans?
Push them back into the ocean@@johndbuell
Bash and PowerShell have come callling.
I still do a fair amount of work within a command line. Granted I am becoming a minority old guy by doing this. But I can still do some actions much quicker in command line than via the mouse.
Great look at the past! 9:15. As a DOS nerd, I'm sure it could be done in less than 10 commands. In DOS 6.22, you could do it with 2 commands xcopy and deltree. In 1986 (DOS 3.2), deltree didn't exist yet, so it would probably take 3 commands or you'd need a third party tool.
10 sounds better.
Certainly I was thinking some wildcards etc wouldn’t go amiss if you were using it yourself. But of course the commands they printed may have been a more accurate representation of the commands that GEM initiated in the backend.
How are those leather elbow patches on your jumper looking
DOS never had an /s parameter for rd. That was Windows NT. DR-DOS had XDEL, long before MS-DOS.
@@OpenGL4ever you're right, I've been using /s in cmd for so long that I just assumed it was also in a DOS version but I guess if it was then there would be no need for deltree.exe.
GEM TOS on the ST was great
my 520ST is currently running GEM , when i sue it i forget to wait !!! and wait and wait
They didn't anticipate Clippy!
I remember buying my 1st external hard drive with a "whopping" 20 MB (megabytes) of storage. I thought that would be enough to last for the rest of my life!
@@TinLeadHammer megabytes
20, 40, 80, 160, 240, 512, 1GB - at every point I thought I was good forever… the phone I’m on 64GB, my laptop 1TB, my desktop 4TB.
The distributed multi-volume (“disk”) DB I queried at work yesterday: 15PB (peta-bytes, 15,000TB) 😂
That’s why we refused Unix, it would this ridicules big disk just for its own needs. No way!!!
Storage, not memory
@@klaatubob Thanks for the correction. I fixed my comment to say storage.
Fred Harris was on Play School when I was little.
Let's look through the arch window.
I once used Gem on the Atari ST but as an operating system it was outrageous, truly, truly outrageous..
What'd ya use it for?
It did the job for me, nothing amazing but then Windows, Mac OS, Amiga's Workbench - none were amazing really.
Luckily it wasn't contagious.
Can't believe nobody got your reference.
@@johndbuell Computer manufacturers have been trying for years to get the perfect Synergy.
@@retrosim4197 They keep focusing on AR/VR goggles instead of the proven earrings. ;)
Proper education. Loved watching Ian McNaught-Davis and his team when I was a teenager.
I love these old computer programs from my childhood. I see why they selected this clip with the prediction at the end, since it’s very relevant now with the first generation of AI chips being just released.
Can't wait for this to become available.
It's still in Beta but a new release will be available soon...!
"There's always going to be the risk of people getting lost inside computer systems."
😅
Here's a radical idea. Why not look at the books sitting next to the computer on the set? They documented all of the DOS commands.
Graphical User Interfaces were at the cutting edge of the day and pushed the computing power to its limit. It is easy to sit back decades later and scoff.
Also remember that in the day, Apple was suing any other manufacturer creating a GUI for their computer.
Exactly! It’s like they don’t know how to read. Crazy!
GEOS was on the C64 and Commodore 128 during this time, although you did require a floppy drive.
Geos came out the same year, the Amiga 1000 was out the year before. The Xerox alto came out in 1973. Everyone copied it (Xerox got apple stock to get a tour and some xerox employees jumped ship)
@@phill6859 Workbench 1.x was pretty much a gimmick on a floppy driven Amiga with 256KB of RAM in 1985, especially due to fact that it wasnt even a full GUI at all. And yes the ALTO was the first, but the later XEROX Star was the one that was copied by everybody.
Well it did a lot more than GEM and m/tasked too. Most were sold with 512k anyway...
@@amigachris what exactly did GEOS do a lot more then GEM?
Atari Gem should only be used in one mode and one mode only hi res. It shone in hi res, and truly allowed the machine to do stuff like DTP, word processing, etc at a level similar to the classic Macintosh
Agree. You got a lot of bang for your buck with the ST.
while the hi res mode was certainly the best use scenario, there was no reason not to use it in medium or even low resolution either.
Atari ST in those days gave you a hard choice between buying a high-res monochrome or a standard-def-TV-resolution colour monitor.
@@donutschool not really, since the SM124 was just around 100USD, and for colour you could use any colour TV (especially in Europe), it was no brainer.
@@donutschool I tend to think that's probably okay, as at the time if you purchased a hi res monitor you needed that exclusively for the applications you ran. You probably were not going to run games which is where the low res modes shined.
It was almost like have two completely separate computers.
Thanks for encoding at 50fps, ITN Archive should take note
Any idea what the source recording is? It is remarkable.
Using Notepad on an early Windows version and a 256 kB PC was a true nightmare. A sentence took ~1 min to display. Childhood memories... 🤣
Windows got better for a time, but then came Windows 11.
@@gdutfulkbhh7537 You dont have to use Windows. There are powerful, open, free to use/modify and well made operating systems out there. :)
This is when I joined the industry. At work, I was using the latest PC technology: the IBM AT and IBM DOS. Gem desktop was a curiosity and Windows was unknown. By the time I left that first job, in 1990, Windows 386 was just being installed in one part of the business; the "official IT department" that I was a part of didn't know anything about it. I joined IBM where it's employees generally hadn't even seen the IBM PC or DOS.
I had this problem back then but working shifts and not owning a VCR, I didn't see this program. I read the DOS manual, taught myself it, Lotus 123 and programming databases using DataEase. I had an Epson PC.
My mom did an Open Universaity course and had an Amstrad PC. It had GEM on and after learning on the Spectrum 128K, I carried on coding in BASIC on there. I even used dial up internet and accessed the various bulletin boards. A far cry from the internet now
Mom?
Who remembers the times when a Windows PC came with a 300 page DOS manual? Computing was cool back then. I remember being impressed by Windows '95 but being blown away by the DOS manual that came with it. 30 years on and I still have the same love for the Linux CLI.
loved to see who programmes - I remember these used to be on a BBC1 on a Sunday morning
I remember using Gem on my PC1512 a couple of times (to print the tiger example image from the paint app on my dot matrix) but coming from a C64 I was more than happy to use MS-DOS.
The actual truth is that command line based interface are much more productive than the graphical ones.
The only negative about them is that you have to learn them.
Speed is not always the most important metric. I would argue that ease of use and the self-documenting nature of a good GUI, and the look and feel of such, is more important. This is why I prefer Windows over Linux. It is also why I preferred the Amiga in the 80s over DOS. A few seconds saved isn't significant in the bigger picture.
@@toby9999 I can for sure understand the feeling, the experience of a GUi is a factor. And the lower threshold of learning due to the visual nature. I remember myself the feeling I had with the Amiga,it was wonderful. And Dos, yeah, it was horrendous. I can't however see the benefit of using windows these days over linux even if you're using only a gui. Linux distroa has had many years to cstch up on that. And today I would say most distros do a much better job experience wise and feature wise than windows. And linux isn't anymore thst beast thst when something gives you trouble thst its difficult to solve. I would rather say thst when windows gives you trouble, you are in much worse situation to solve it than if something must be fixed in linux.
Side note, there is ONE thing that GUIs does better. If you have a mixed set of files to manipulate (copy, move, etc.) a gui based file explorer does thst easily with multiselect feature. Not even a good regex can do it in some cases on the terminal.
Digital Research GEM was way more advanced than the Windows at this time, too bad it suffered from Apple lawsuit loss by which they had to cut down on the features Apple deemed lifted from MacOS which Apple themselves lifted from PaloAlto machine.
I remember the first time I used an Atari ST I put in a disk and read the instruction to 'double-click' on the icon. I didn't know what that meant as I'd never used a mouse before. :)
Which is why solitaire was there for Windows
At 0:48 it's like entering a Tom Scott video.
I had GEM on my Amstrad PC1512, it was cool but it was very slow, so I only used it for GEM PAINT. I much prefered the speed of DOS for file management.
Used to love XTree for file management on my PC1512.
I tried GEM on a school PC. It was really slow compared to the Atari ST
These programs are legend. A modern revamp would be a popular choice for viewing. Please include how electro waves can be used to hack and copy/steal Data from your stand alone computer without any connection.
These days they have BBC Click which is a near equivalent.
I was not expecting to see window snapping and the "hamburger" menu button in Windows 1.0.
Micro Live's dynamic duo Fred and Mac extolling the virtues of the competing GUI's of the day. Professor David Canter showed a very apt analogy comparing DOS with trying to navigate through the Barbican Centre - and I thought it was a nightmare on the outside.
Multiplan and notebook!
Most people doing spreadsheets at the time were running Lotus 1-2-3, but Microsoft used their own Multiplan software in the demo. The first Windows version of Excel wouldn't be released until a year later.
In 1986, aside from Notepad text editor and the Write word processor (which were both supplied with Windows) there was basically no useful native software for Windows. GEM may have been slightly ahead at that point, eg. Ventura Publisher was released in late 1986 and ran under GEM.
I think the idea of actually reading the manual to understand how to use the computer was dismissed rather abruptly.
That Microsoft demo was next-level stuff. The GEM demo was nifty, but in the Windows demo, he copied part of a spreadsheet into a document. I'm sure many people watching then were amazed by that functionality.
People were so impressed that Microsoft execs demanded to embed presentations in emails for decades to come.
Nearly 40 years later and they still haven't worked it out. lol.
In those days, my experience with computational machines was limited to typing 80085 into a calculator and sniggering.
And 71077345 (shell oil) and 5318008 (boobies)! This is how kids in the 80s got their kicks!
"Computers can be so tricky! It's like getting lost in a huge building! If only there was some kind book that we could use!"
They're called manuals. They came with the computer. They're on your desk. You just pointed to them. RTFM
Still using Atari GEM today at 640x400. When switching back to 4K on Win11 the visual shift is stunning
9:26 in honour of this clip I might start referring to my mouse as the clicker
A fascinating look back. I worked at Epson's R&D centre in the mid 1980s, on Taxi, their GUI which was launched shortly before Windows. To think what could have been....
What is the recording technology used here in 1986 - it is a wonderful restoration.
I used Ventura Publisher under GEM for about a year to create documentation. It ran quite well.... back in 1986.
"Symbols" and not "Icons"! "Drag and Deposit" and not "Drag and Drop"! WYSIWYG was really something new back then! (unless you worked at Xerox!).
My favourite is “the clicker” instead of the mouse 😊
@@kaitlyn__L click click
@@kaitlyn__L "I'm gonna buy a new clicker" sounds much better tbh. Lets call them clickers again.
This technology was invented at Xerox PARC and built on the work of Doug Engelbart and his team.
This is great. We take it for granted nowadays that it's quite easy to interact with a computer, but it was a long and painful process to get to Windows, Linux, etc. Just using an 8-bit home microcomputer in the 1980s was horrendous, and a complete non-starter if you weren't that interested.
I've still got the 5.25 floppies with GEM on it for Amstrad CPC.
My first PC-clone was an Amstrad PC1512DD with GEM. Crazy computer for an American
Things to Come... Bliss!
Gem was fantastic. Was my introduction to a GUI.
Ooh u remember GEM on our old Amstrad! Great intro at the Barbican. The DOS copy commands could have been shortened a bit with a wildcard within the directory of course 😉
Fred Harris Computer Legend!!
Atari ST ❤❤❤
RTFI...You see those documents/books. You read that first, easy. That is what I did back in the early 1980's for my first computer, and the same thing when I moved over to another type with a different operating system, and then when I went on to a third and fourth one. I even had to do it in the late 1970's when I got my first programmable calculator.
Damn, I was an infant when this aired and Barbican Centre was only a few years old
In 1986 I remember Gem and it was such a great application and far in advance of alot of the alternatives. Then MS / Apple did all kinds of stuff to beat the competition, some good and alot bad.
It's too early to declare a winner but I think GEM's got this
How exactly can you be lost when there is only one directory on that floppy disk? If he's going to make an analogy with a building, then that's a building of only one room on the ground floor. When he said "you don't know if they (rooms) link up to other rooms...", he was pointing at the tree command, the very instruction which would show him a map of linked rooms (as he put it).
7:15 Did that window just use an opening animation?? They built a compositor for this?? Jesus these guys were certified champs
Wow, thanks for bringing back some old memory. The first version of Windows for me was v2.0 or v2.1 or something.😀
I remember getting access to GEM in the school library. I found that I could rename "hard disk" and "floppy disk" to "stiff disk" and "limp disk" hehehe
The guy @12:40 opines that 'better" software will INCREASE the Slope of the Learning curve - and with his hands, makes an UPHILL motion. This is a common mistake - learning curves actually focus on things getting easier over time - and so surely this means the learning curve must STEEPLY REDUCE. In other words, go DOWNHILL.
These guys are spot on, holly hell we have terrible press now
Nearly 40 years later and I still can't find the settings I want to get to on windows, Mac os, android or Linux.. perhaps that building in the intro was designed by software engineers.
12:10 - Guess this guy didn’t know about the Amiga already having GUI acceleration via Blitter, Copper, etc.. :)
Well, blitting wasn't new in the Amiga, either, and maybe he was just indicating that the capabilities of graphics chips were ramping up to deal with higher resolutions and colour depths. NEC already made the 7220 that could do blitting and it was fairly well known.
Of course, the Amiga's custom chips didn't really measure up when the machine was pushed into the Unix workstation role, and Commodore had to bring in a dedicated accelerator card to try and offer reasonable X Window System performance. Despite excitement about bringing the Amiga's custom chips into the Unix/X market, it would be interesting to know why they were a bad fit for the role.
We've come a long way
I've got to praise you like a child.
A program from 1986 that every Linux dev in 2024 should be made to watch!
Gem on the atari ste was my first desktop os, but before that I had a mouse for my zx spectrum+2 and the art software had dropdown menus. Also remember the BBC Micro at school had a trackball, it all seemed so futuristic 😂
I still use .TXT (Notepad) files now, so it was kinda nice as in fuzzy nice to see .TXT on the screen of the Windows machine in this video from almost 40 years ago :-) If memory serves though, I think it was Windows 3.1 around 1991/2 that firmly put MS Windows on the map
It's funny how true this still is. I've been using the command line for 15-20 years now, so the issue is not familiarity with it, but I still need tools that set out the possible things I can do with them rather than require me to know and remember that in advance. TUI may be fine but you'll never see me using neovim. Even nano displays the commands at the bottom so I can;t get immediately lost. If I need to fix something physical I'll open my toolbox and start looking through to find the tool that seems the best fit, not just instantly remember it's Meta+X Alt+Q r r. For that reason a good GUI is worth its weight in gold and common UI patterns generally need to be followed, as there isn;t enough space in my brain to hold more than the absolute basics for the hundreds of applications I need to use all the time
That's gotta be The Barbican. Still looks good today.
I know GEM primarily from my Atari ST / TOS days. So seeing it used on a PC is interesting. It looks familiar but still a bit different.
As somebody who grew up in that time: Kids, you are SO lucky to not have to deal with the many headaches of the time, and to have all these ridiculously powerful tools at your fingertips! Don't just waste it on social media.
This revolutionised how BBC luminaries and other UK television actors organised their PDF files, including David Jason
It's funny how at that moment Gem had overlapping windows, while Windows didn't. Apple would sue Gem for this feature, forcing them to release an inferior version 3 which had the feature removed and essentially broke their company, while Microsoft went on to release Windows 3, which was a huge success... and had overlapping windows. It's also funny how nowadays tiled windows are all the rage, when in the 80's they were considered an inconvenience, and everybody was clamoring for the ability to place and resize your windows anywhere you wanted.
3:39 ah the days when the display bezel was bigger than the actual screen.
It's very impressive what they managed to code and run with such limited ressources.
Look at all the manuals. Professionally written quality binding. Now we have to search the 'net for an answer we actually dont know the question to pose
I love how long it took to create the empty "plan" folder.
Sod the computers! Who was that gorgeous creature giving the directions by the lift??
some granny, who knows.
When you think anew, how unfriendly all the GUI software is!
1:40 Indeed, at any given time/position the user has to be able to get help what are the available shortcuts (key or/and mouse combos).
I myself am writing in this style, way to go...
A text manual would have taken a good chunk of scarce disk space. Deinterlaced video with hand waving smooth as butter at 50 fps.
Crikey, I remember using Gem at work about 1986
Awesome show! 😀👍
“What is an intelligent front end?” 😮
Chatgpt
Microsoft BOB
It's a quote from the video. I thought the quotation marks would have indicated that. It's also a subtle piece of innuendo from the interviewer.
Is that Vicky Butler Henderson giving directions by the lift?
I have an idea. What if you have a rectangle with a screen in your hand and you touch at what you want to use?
Of course a 30kg cathode-ray tube could be a bit much for old granny but if you're young and healthy it could be the new thing!
Why is there a squashed insect icon when the files were being copied?
It's a busy icon, a busy bee.
@@Ian45968 Of course! That makes perfect sense... duh!
The tall rectangular pixels really didn't help matters, did they!
@@joloco72 They certainly didn't! 😳
@@joloco72 They didn't! It looks a lot better in hi res mode.