Xerox Cedar “Viewers Window Package” (2018)

toastytech.com

23 points·pjmlp··3 comments

This says “developed after the Star“ but imho the Dandelion (marketed as the star) was too slow for this environment and you needed one of the bigger machines (Dolphin or Dorado).

Actually it’s kind of amazing to realize that two years later youncould get a small Mac for about a fifth the price that sat on your desk (not rolled next to it on casters) and was much more responsive. Did less, but what it did it did well, and was all that most people needed.

In addition to the Smalltalk and Mesa environments mentioned in the post, there was the Interlisp-D environment too, which got much more use outside thanks to being used outside PARC.

The Computer History Museum organized a session with Eric Bier, and several other folks demoing the Mesa/Cedar environment.

https://youtu.be/z_dt7NG38V4

The only modern environments that seem to have kept alive several of these ideas are Windows/.NET/COM, the ones designed by Apple/NeXT and to certain extent Android (although with a messed up execution).

Even Linux could grasp many of these ideas, if D-BUS would be properly taken advantage of and settled on a specific development experience.

Somehow it looks like we are still missing so much from Xerox PARC ideas.

A resolution of 1024×768 is pretty cool for 1982. I think it took at least 15 years or more until I had such a monitor at home.

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