1. [n]  art highly prized for its beauty or perfection
2. [n]  a precious or semiprecious stone incorporated into a piece of jewelry
3. [n]  a sweet quick bread baked in a cup-shaped pan
4. [n]  a person who is a brilliant and precious as a piece of jewelry
5. [n]  a crystalline rock that can be cut and polished for jewelry; "he had the gem set in a ring for his wife"; "she had jewels made of all the rarest stones"

1. \Gem\, n. [OE. gemme precious stone, F. gemme, fr. L. gemma
   a precious stone, bud.]
   1. (Bot.) A bud.
            From the joints of thy prolific stem A swelling knot
            is raised called a gem.               --Denham.
   2. A precious stone of any kind, as the ruby, emerald, topaz,
      sapphire, beryl, spinel, etc., especially when cut and
      polished for ornament; a jewel. --Milton.
   3. Anything of small size, or expressed within brief limits,
      which is regarded as a gem on account of its beauty or
      value, as a small picture, a verse of poetry, a witty or
      wise saying.
   {Artificial gem}, an imitation of a gem, made of glass
      colored with metallic oxide. Cf. {Paste}, and {Strass}.
   

2. \Gem\ v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Gemmed}; p. pr. & vb. n.
   {Gemming}]
   1. To put forth in the form of buds. ``Gemmed their
      blossoms.'' [R.] --Milton.
   2. To adorn with gems or precious stones.
   3. To embellish or adorn, as with gems; as, a foliage gemmed
      with dewdrops.
            England is . . . gemmed with castles and palaces.
                                                  --W. Irving.
   

One of the first commercially available GUIs. Borrowing heavily from the Macintosh WIMP-style interface it was available for both the IBM compatible market (being packaged with Amstrad's original PC series) and more successfully for the Atari ST range. The PC version was produced by Digital Research (more famous for DR-DOS, their MS-DOS clone), and was not developed very far. The Atari version, however, continued to be developed until the early 1990s and the later versions supported 24-bit colour modes, full colour icons and a nice looking sculpted 3D interface.