Editing Desk accessory (section)

==GEM==
[[image:DA OpenGem.png|thumb|right|400px|The supplied desk accessories in [[OpenGEM]]]]
[[Graphics Environment Manager|GEM]] resembled the Macintosh closely in many respects. One example was the presence of desk accessories, for the same reason: to allow multiple programs to be used in a system that only supported one full application at a time (although GEM desk accessories used [[Context switching|task switching]] and not [[cooperative multitasking]] like the [[Apple macintosh|Macintosh]].)

From a programming point of view, desk accessories were implemented, like other GEM applications, as [[DOS executable|DOS .EXE files]], with names ending with .ACC (Accessory) rather than .APP (Application). Each .ACC file could support multiple accessories; all three of the standard GEM accessories (Calculator, Clock and Print Spooler) were provided by <code>CALCLOCK.ACC</code>. Installation was simply a matter of placing the .ACC in the correct directory - <code>\GEMBOOT</code> in earlier versions, and <code>\GEMAPPS\GEMSYS</code> in GEM/3 and later.

Since each desk accessory loaded reduced the amount of memory available for programs, one technique for temporarily increasing available space was to rename one or more .ACC files to have a different suffix (usually .ACX) and restart GEM. On the [[Amstrad]] [[PC-1512]], for example, the Snapshot accessory was shipped as <code>SNAPSHOT.ACX</code> and had to be renamed to .ACC prior to use.

Desk accessories continued to be supported in [[ViewMAX]], the [[DR-DOS]] file manager, which was supplied with almost unchanged versions of Calculator and Clock.