I managed DR's European Graphics Group (EGG), our office in Oxford St, Newbury was known as the Egg Box. We got Gem products translated into European languages and even Arabic. We worked with European distributors, such as the brilliant Torsten Arendrup in Denmark. We worked with European suppliers of applications, such as ABC and (SIS, I think, in Marburg in Germany who did) Artline. By the way, I wrote the code in the VDI that draws Bezier curves. When I demonstrated it to Dick
Williams, I showed that it ran more than ten times as fast as the original code in Artline, so he allowed the launch to be delayed to put my code in. I looked into patenting it, but we never did.
What was your favourite thing about DR GEM?
As I remember saying in a marketing presentation I wrote and gave, Gem (or, indeed, any GUI, though at the time there was only the Apple Lisa and Mac) extends the language of the user's interaction with the computer from the simple imperative <command><subject> of the command line to a rich dialogue with adjectives and adverbs, less need to remember command syntax
and far better feedback of the effects of your actions.
What was the worst thing about DR GEM in your opinion?
DR. If it had been MS GEM it would have been a world-beater.
How do you think DR GEM compared to Windows 1.x?
Miles better. And, of course, launched first. Having two fixed size desktop windows was a mistake, though.
Have you paid attention to the rise of OpenGEM/FreeGEM?
Not really. Sorry.
What was the coolest technology DR made, and is it GPL?
Concurrent DOS. Sorry, but I'm a sucker for reentrancy and all those elegant things.
What do you do now?
Nothing. Was made redundant by Oracle.
What do you want to do in the future?
Thinking of making sundials for a living - I've invented several.
What do you think computers will be like in ten years?
Ten years! Give us a break. The industry has been hopeless at crystal-ball gazing. But what the heck:
- wirelessly permanently connected to very broadband internet, so having much less need for mass storage.
- Major applications, such as databases will be run as services by their vendors, not installed on customers' computers.
- Immersive graphics ideas will have been stolen from the games industry, making professional applications much easier to use
-total convergence of computers, TV, games, music: home entertainment.
