[ochrist]

I used GEM on some PCs around 1990. At that time I had an Archimedes and was studying in a computer school. I did some DTP (a school magazine) together with a couple of classmates, and we could have done it on my Arch. But then they would have been out of it, so we used their more ordinary PCs and used GEM on them. It worked smoothly and was very responsive.

[lwhi]

I remember using a DTP on GEM called Finesse around the same time!

[roryirvine]

There was also Ventura Publisher, which was one of the most important DTP packages at the time. It ran under GEM, and was probably the biggest driver of GEM sales at the tail end of the 1980s.

Unfortunately, it was bought by Xerox in 1990-ish, with development slowing from that point onwards - not helped by a decision to port it to OS/2 ahead of Windows, which turned out to have been a sub-optimal choice once Win3 began to take off.

Its main competitor was Aldus Pagemaker, which was originally a Mac app but became available on Win/386 just as the MacII line was beginning to stagnate. By the time that QuarkXPress finally arrived on the PC in 1992, GEM was long since dead and OS/2 was nearly so. Xerox sold Ventura to Corel in the mid-90s, but it never managed to regain its early popularity.