GEM was the graphical desktop environment that shipped on the Atari ST from 1985. It gave the ST a consistent, window-based interface at a time when most home computers were still command-line machines — and for a decade, an enormous catalogue of serious software was built on top of it: music tools, DTP applications, graphics programs, professional utilities. The ecosystem was real and deep.

From Film Competition to Global Recognition

I never expected Sad Disco to go anywhere. It began as a submission to the “Pusher II Soundtrack Hunt” — a competition Nicolas Winding Refn organised alongside GAFFA and Mymusic, looking for diegetic music to use inside his film. I entered on something of a whim. To my surprise, Refn and his music director liked it enough to place it in the actual film, Pusher II. One review from CineVue described it as “a haunting, hypnotic backdrop to the film’s darker themes.” I was relieved. It had done its job.

That should have been the end of the story.

The case for more choices in desktop computing.

Differences matter. Not just in the abstract, philosophical sense — as with Yin and Yang, the dry and wet sides of the mountain — but practically. We need to hear more than echoes of ourselves to stay sane, to know where we end and the world begins.

Computing forgot this somewhere along the way.

The Atari ST’s BLiTTER chip was designed for one thing: moving rectangles of pixels around as fast as possible. It’s not a processor. It can’t branch. It has no ALU. And yet, buried inside it is a smudge mode that turns its halftone pattern registers into a 16-entry lookup table — which means, if you’re creative enough with your data layout, you can coax it into doing arithmetic.

Which raises an obvious question: could you run Conway’s Game of Life on it?