alt Hacker News> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development
Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time.
The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master.
I think many others may have similar thoughts.
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GEM was in TOS on the later Atari ST models. TOS was named after Jack Tramiel, Tramiel Operating System.
Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones.
As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications.
> Not so sure about this.
WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.
I got all the GEM docs through Archie at umich.edu. You could get everything there including the entire GNU toolchain and MiNT so you could have a real development environment.
Between DM sessions, of course. Or Time Bandits.