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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Sun Microsystems had pizzatool in 1990:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...

OT, but that got me on memory lane to Pizza Tycoon. https://archive.org/details/msdos_Pizza_Tycoon_1994

Wow looks like a sys admin made that UI. I knew a brilliant sys admin who loved Solaris and still had it running under his desk. All the forms he designed were way too busy and all over the place. More options than anyone could possibly use.

to be fair -- that UI is literally designed to be an example of all the different forms options that were possible. So that was kindof the point.

"It’s a programming example for The NeWS Toolkit, and it tests out and shows how to use all the different widgets, dialogs, drag and drop, lightweight threading, and PostScript drawing."

That's right! Here's the source code, with meticulous comments explaining how it works, since it was meant to serve as a programming example to help people learn how to use TNT / OOP / NeWS / PostScript.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

I even wrote a manual entry (it shipped with Solaris 2.0, so documentation was required):

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt

I just posted more here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383697

PizzaTool was written in Sun's "NeWS" dialect of PostScript (which James Gosling made after Emacs but before Java), which it has all kinds of extensions for multiple drawing surfaces (canvases), events, light weight threads, networking, object oriented programming, etc.

So for example PizzaTool would fork off a light weight thread to handle spinning the pizza, and another one to draw toppings, and the user interface had its own thread of course. So the user interface would not freeze up while it drew toppings and spun the pizza, all at the same time!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:

> - used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

> - used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.

> - used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.

To be fair, most software from that era looked like that. For added old school fun, most of them were terminal apps that didn't support a mouse.

I don't know how anyone could maintain their appetite for what they were ordering while looking at that toothpaste-green and tomato-crème color scheme.

I thought of it as "minty fresh"!

At least it wasn't as bad as TCL/Tk's original default "Bisque" (aka "Ousterhour Beige" aka "Baby Diarrhea Gamut") color scheme. ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173197

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/tk_bisque

The "bisque is beautiful" slogan first appeared on a T-shirt in 1995.

http://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/tcl-wear/bisque.html

If you thought PizzaTool looked like a 747 cockpit, you should have seen "XBugTool", which was originally an insanely complicated SunView application called "BugTool" that was run through an AWK script to convert it to XView, and the "monkey on the back of all Sun engineers" that we were required to use to report bugs.

It had dynamically reconfiguring scrolling sub-panels of widgets inside of other dynamically reconfiguring scrolling panels of widgets, that would dynamically reconfigure, flicker, and repaint the screen madly, whenever you picked items from menus or just looked at it funny!

Just don't DARE to use XBugTool to report a bug against itself, as I foolishly tried to do once, after I teased its scrolling lists, and it got angry and froze my mouse, stole my input focus, and would not give it back. I was trapped in XBugTool and could not get out, so I wrote a desperate cry for help as Sun Bug ID #1059974.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...

Is there a screenshot of xbugtool (or video but that's prolly asking too much)? Google did not find anything.

I regret never making a screen snapshot myself, so probably not. I fear that Oracle is keeping XBugTool in reserve as kind of a doomsday weapon to deploy on unsuspecting customers they suspect of disloyalty, to prevent them from ever filing bugs against any Oracle software.

One thing I did keep a screen snapshot of was of how XCalc loses its shit after you resize it a bunch of times.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/XCalc....

I remember there was a HyperCard stack that did this as well, that must have been the early 90's.

That article really tries to drive home the message that the author ordered pizza over the Internet, but all I can see for the actual ordering process was sending a fax, which... is not the Internet.

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