GDOS was a selection of routines that handled the GKS drawing, while GIOS actually used the underlying hardware to produce the output. The former was known as GDOS (Graphics Device Operating System) and the latter as GIOS (Graphics Input/Output System), a play on the division of CP/M into the machine-independent BDOS (Basic Disk Operating System) and the machine-specific BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). GSX consisted of two parts: a selection of routines for common drawing operations, and the device drivers that are responsible for handling the actual output.

GSX was intended to allow DRI to write graphics programs (charting, etc.) for any of the 8-bit and 16-bit platforms CP/M-80, Concurrent CP/M, CP/M-86 and MS-DOS ( NEC APC-III) would run on, a task that otherwise would have required considerable effort to port due to the large differences in graphics hardware (and concepts) between the various systems of that era. GSX was essentially a DRI-specific implementation of the GKS graphics standard proposed in the late 1970s.

Lee Lorenzen (at Graphic Software Systems, Inc.) who had recently left Xerox PARC (the birthplace of the modern GUI) wrote much of the code. In late 1984, GEM started life at DRI as an outgrowth of a more general-purpose graphics library known as GSX (Graphics System Extension), written by a team led by Don Heiskell since about 1982. DRI also produced X/GEM for their FlexOS real-time operating system with adaptations for OS/2 Presentation Manager and the X Window System under preparation as well. It was ported to a number of other computers that previously lacked graphical interfaces, but never gained popularity on those platforms. It was the core for a small number of DOS programs, the most notable being Ventura Publisher. It was also available for the standard IBM PC, at a time when the 6 MHz IBM PC AT (and the very concept of a GUI) was brand new. GEM is known primarily as the graphical user interface (GUI) for the Atari ST series of computers, and was also supplied with a series of IBM PC-compatible computers from Amstrad. GEM (for Graphics Environment Manager ) is a discontinued operating environment released by Digital Research (DRI) in 1985 for use with the DOS operating system on x86 microprocessors, and later ported to run on DRI's GEMDOS on Motorola 68000 microprocessors.

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