I was very peripherally involved with the efforts to modernise the DR GEM desktop when it went FOSS. Lineo also made CP/M FOSS -- kinda sorta. We also got the unfinished beta of a multitasking GEM for DOS.
What was not made FOSS, because it had been sold, was the CP/M-86 line. I went digging into the history.
CP/M-86 did exist, it worked, and IBM did licence it... but it was late and much more expensive than PC DOS.
My personal theory is that DR discovered that a direct port of CP/M was a bit of a waste of an 8086, which could juggle 16 64 kB memory segments concurrently (subject to ROM restrictions, etc.) So CP/M became Concurrent CP/M, which had very basic text-console-only DOS compatibility -- e.g. it could run PKZIP.
DR upgraded the DOS compatibility and it became Concurrent DOS. This was rewritten in C and became Concurrent DOS 286. This had problems multitasking DOS apps on certain steppings of the Intel 80286.
I wonder if they abandoned their efforts to get it multitasking 8086 stuff and just focussed on the native 286 mode? Anyway, CDOS 286 got forked internally and became FlexOS -- DR's multitasking RTOS. It even had a GUI, X/GEM, a fully multitasking PC GEM.
Meantime, Concurrent DOS became a native 386 OS with far more success, as the 386 directly supported multitasking DOS boxes in hardware. It sold OK -- I worked on a few boxes -- but around this time, LANs of PC workstations with full local graphics cards were becoming affordable. CDOS could do DOS graphics on graphics terminals, but they really needed something quicker than RS-232 connections, and so the setup couldn't compete with a more compatible PC LAN.
But it did work and for text-only stuff like accounts, it was cheaper and easier to manage than a network. DR renamed it again, to Multiuser DOS. Ultimately it was licensed out to at least 3 vendors: 2 Australian companies called Datapack and CCI and a British one, IMS, who renamed it Real/32.
AFAIK, IBM 4680 and 4690 were the 386 version of FlexOS with X/GEM. I've never managed to see so much as a screenshot and as it is still sold and supported, it's not out on the abandonware sites anywhere. :-(
I'm almost certain 4680 was 286. IBM had two very similar supermarket systems that ran on it (General Sales Application and Supermarket Application and a quick google shows Store Management Application as well). They were written in BASIC, and had the concept of User Includes - the system would include an (initially empty) file at various points in the code (when printing stuff, when displaying stuff, after scanning a barcode, before opening cash drawer etc.), along with a bunch of documented variables. Allowing supermarkets to edit the include files to customise the code.
I believe 4690 apps were written in an early dialect of java instead, where presumably inheritance would be used instead of user includes.
I was very peripherally involved with the efforts to modernise the DR GEM desktop when it went FOSS. Lineo also made CP/M FOSS -- kinda sorta. We also got the unfinished beta of a multitasking GEM for DOS.
What was not made FOSS, because it had been sold, was the CP/M-86 line. I went digging into the history.
CP/M-86 did exist, it worked, and IBM did licence it... but it was late and much more expensive than PC DOS.
My personal theory is that DR discovered that a direct port of CP/M was a bit of a waste of an 8086, which could juggle 16 64 kB memory segments concurrently (subject to ROM restrictions, etc.) So CP/M became Concurrent CP/M, which had very basic text-console-only DOS compatibility -- e.g. it could run PKZIP.
DR upgraded the DOS compatibility and it became Concurrent DOS. This was rewritten in C and became Concurrent DOS 286. This had problems multitasking DOS apps on certain steppings of the Intel 80286.
I wonder if they abandoned their efforts to get it multitasking 8086 stuff and just focussed on the native 286 mode? Anyway, CDOS 286 got forked internally and became FlexOS -- DR's multitasking RTOS. It even had a GUI, X/GEM, a fully multitasking PC GEM.
Meantime, Concurrent DOS became a native 386 OS with far more success, as the 386 directly supported multitasking DOS boxes in hardware. It sold OK -- I worked on a few boxes -- but around this time, LANs of PC workstations with full local graphics cards were becoming affordable. CDOS could do DOS graphics on graphics terminals, but they really needed something quicker than RS-232 connections, and so the setup couldn't compete with a more compatible PC LAN.
But it did work and for text-only stuff like accounts, it was cheaper and easier to manage than a network. DR renamed it again, to Multiuser DOS. Ultimately it was licensed out to at least 3 vendors: 2 Australian companies called Datapack and CCI and a British one, IMS, who renamed it Real/32.
AFAIK, IBM 4680 and 4690 were the 386 version of FlexOS with X/GEM. I've never managed to see so much as a screenshot and as it is still sold and supported, it's not out on the abandonware sites anywhere. :-(
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I believe 4690 apps were written in an early dialect of java instead, where presumably inheritance would be used instead of user includes.
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I have now found what may be a copy. It's a bunch of EXE files, though. I will put it in a VM and prod it very carefully with a stick...
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