Gemstone characteristic that lends value to a gemstone. Apart from jewelry, from earliest antiquity engraved gems and hardstone carvings, such as cups, were major luxury art forms. A gem maker is called a lapidary or gemcutter; a diamond cutter is called a diamantaire. The traditional classification in the West, which goes back to the ancient Greeks, begins with a distinction between "precious" and "semi-precious"; similar distinctions are made in other cultures. In modern use the precious stones are diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald, with all other gemstones being semi-precious. This distinction reflects the rarity of the respective stones in ancient times,
Gemstone (database) Gemstone (database) GemStone/S is computer software, an application framework that was first available for the programming language Smalltalk as an object database. It is proprietary commercial software. GemStone Systems was founded on March 1, 1982 as Servio Logic, to build a database machine based on a set theory model. Ian Huang instigated the founding, as the technology adviser to the CEO of Sampoerna Holdings (Putera Sampoerna), by recruiting Frank Bouton (President) who was the cofounder of Floating Point Systems Inc, Dr. Michael Mulder (Vice President of Engineering) who was the Group Manager for Advanced Processor Design at Sperry Univac and