GEM - Carat and Stick, cut and no paste from DR.

Digital Research's own personal Mac attack, GEM (Graphics Environment Manager), is about to fire the first shots in a personal computing revolution.

GEM Desktop, a Macintosh lookalike, with PC/MSDOS front-end will be available from April 15 1985 for £49.95. GEM Draw, a cut-down version of MacPaint, will be released on the same date at an introductory price of £129.95, rising to £229.95 after August 1 1985. Other applications are to follow in summer.

The GEM collection, GEM Write, GEM Paint and GEM Desktop will be launched as a package on June 15 at £129.95, to be followed by GEM Graph (£179.95) and GEM Wordchart (£129.95) on July 1.

DR has licensed GEM to ACT, and Atari's ST will feature GEM in ROM. Since the GEM products released only run on the IBM PC, XT or AT, PC-compatible micro makers will be under pressure to launch GEM-running machines. Commodore, Sinclair and other will feel the pinch, too.

Digital Research claims that many software houses are coding GEM applications for release in the immediate future and more than 200 GEM programmer's toolkits have been sold. DR is deliberately keeping prices down to encourage third party software vendors to do likewise.

GEM on a standard IBM PC is rather slow but 68000 versions, or GEM on hard disk, are much faster,and GEM can handle sixteen colours. The colour support and GEM's portability might spell trouble for the Mac, but DR faces the difficulty of producing a host of data files to allow end users to tailor GEM to their particular system.

Moreover, GEM feels like a precursor to the Lisa and Mac systems; not a development - several features are missing and GEM Draw isn't a patch on MacPaint.

But if DR can sign up more OEMs, like Atari, we'll see lots of Mac lookalike systems and software by the end of the year.