SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (Nee HyperNeWS) (2018) | Hacker News Reader

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (Nee HyperNeWS) (2018)

donhopkins.medium.com

77 pointsarethuza4 comments

Very interesting, I didn’t know PostScript was capable of this kind of software - my interest was especially piqued when he mentioned it’s homoiconic. It’s a shame these hypermedia efforts had a tendency of being ignored and unloved by their parent corporations, they would likely flourish as open-source projects. There’s something about wholly object oriented systems that is incredibly promising, though only within the bounds of the system itself, which is why “worse is better” led to the Web and X11 winning.

I worked with HyperNeWS for a few years in the early 90's and did a fair amount of development in PostScript, which is actually a pretty nice programming language.

Performance of NeWS and HyperNeWS was pretty good in the early '90s so I'd love to see what it would be like on contemporary hardware.

I was a fan of HyperNeWS, but although PostScript could be fun, I found it hard work, and used literate programming for the experimental data analysis system I worked on. It was notable that you could easily try different designs for GUI elements, like sliders I remember. It was impressive that HyperNeWS depended on a meta-circular evaluator for some reason I forget, and was still fast enough on the Sun hardware of the time (SPARCstation 1+, I think). One thing missing was any kind of security for the networking as far as I remember, but it allowed you to build more general distributed systems than just client and graphics server.

"Scott McNealy ate my window system" I think was the refrain when it was killed off.

So much of the history of computing is weird with little, brilliant dead ends like this. I wonder if we're past a point in computing where "I didn't know it was hard" is a valid reason to come up with something entirely novel.

I really miss Seattle's Living Computer Museum, because it was full of reminders of how strange our computing history was. In most ways, we've never had it as good as we have it now, but every so often looking back yields some surprises.

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