Everything below is a native GEM program written for Antler — real AES clients drawing into real windows, installed as .APP files (and two .ACC desk accessories) under GEMAPPS on the root filesystem. This is the actual directory listing:
TERMINAL.APP
The GEM terminal, and the only interactive local console on the system. It opens a GEM window connected to a real PTY and runs a job-controlling /bin/sh on the slave side. Ctrl-C, ctrl-Z, background jobs — all of it works the way you'd expect because it is a proper terminal not a fake one.
TASKS.APP
The task manager. Shows what is running on the machine, which on a 640K system you end up caring about quite a lot.
2048.APP
The sliding-tile game. Every OS needs one program with no excuse for existing, this is mine.
SETTINGS.APP
System settings as a GEM application. Lives in GEMAPPS/GEMSYS. SETDEMO.APP is its companion demonstrator, a small app that exercises the settings machinery so changes can be seen taking effect.
IRC.APP
A native IRC client with a clean three-pane layout — channel list, message log, input line — talking through the in-house TCP/IP stack over an NE2000 card. Dirty-region redraw only so an idle channel costs nothing.
WIRE.APP
Wire, the web browser. Written from scratch in the interaction style of HighWire: a bounded history ring with Back, Forward and Reload, pages fetched by HTTP/1.0 GET (with redirect handling) or straight from the local filesystem. It will not render the modern web and it does not try to — but it browses real pages on real 8086 hardware.
EDICON.APP
The icon editor. Antler streams its desktop icons from .ICN block files rather than keeping them resident in RAM, and EDICON is how you draw and edit them, pixel by pixel.
SYSFONT.APP
A bitmap font editor. Loads and saves PSF1, Windows NE-FNT, raw, ZX and TOS format fonts in fixed buffers with exact fixed-width transports. If you want your desktop in a different 8x14, this is where you make it.
SYSCTRL.APP
The system control panel: native services, drivers and mounts, all inspectable and controllable from a GEM window. Status is read from fsys proc files and changes go through the same versioned syscalls the command-line admin tools use, so the GUI never reaches around the kernel.
CALCLOCK.ACC and PALETTE.ACC
Desk accessories, installed under the Desk menu like GEM intended. CALCLOCK is a clock and calculator pair driven by the same native PIT tick service that VDI and AES use; PALETTE manipulates the 16-colour palette.
Beyond the suite there are the system-side GEM programs: gemdesk (the desktop itself), gemlogin (the graphical login form), and gemsession, which is the single place where credentials drop from system to the logged-in user — the desktop and every app you launch inherit your identity from it.