Flashjazzcat's Blog - Writing a Graphical User Interface for the Atari 8-bit

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When Diamond GOS was released in 1988, it seemed that the Atari 8-bit finally had a GUI to compete with the Commodore 64's enviably slick and professional GEOS operating system. A very young Alan Reeve had churned out Diamond while studying Computer Science at Northern Illinois Universty. In the face of various marketing and technical problems he managed to produce a cartridge which to all intents and purposes implemented a cut-down version of the Atari ST's GEM desktop on its 8-bit predecessor.

 

However, while GEOS on the C64 was supported by a number of high-quality applications (a WYSIWYG word processor, desk-top publisher, paint program, BASIC, assembler, and more), Diamond - although it shipped with a rudimentary word processor, paint program, and utility disk - seemed to arrive too late in the life of the Atari 8-bit for third-party software developers to be inspired to create applications for it. Sadly, in fact, I'm not aware of any third party programs which were...

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/blog/281/entry-7830-writing-a-graphical-user-interface-for-the-atari-8-bit/