Calculator Construction Set | Hacker News Reader

Calculator Construction Set

folklore.org

104 pointscyanf18 comments

I love Andy's early history of the Mac at Folklore.org. It's a great read.

A few years back, with Andy's blessing, I extracted all the posts and converted them to Markdown, to address a few issue I found with Folklore.org:

* Does not have a mobile friendly layout

* Missing images

* Low res-thumbnails used in articles, requiring links out to high resolution ones. Missing copyright/license information about the images

* Broken links

* Accessibility issues (images without ALT text, etc)

* Formatting issues

* No Metadata

* Table-based layouts with complex and obtuse HTML markup.

I find this an easier reading experience.

Project: https://github.com/acidus99/folklore.org-export

All the posts in Markdown: https://github.com/acidus99/folklore.org-export/tree/main/Po...

I hacked an X11 window manager to take a command line argument telling it which window id to treat as the root window, then ran xcalc, discovered its window id with "xwininfo" or some such utility, then ran the window manager on the calculator, putting window frames around each of the calculator's buttons, so you could resize them, move them around, open and close them to icons, etc! That was a truly customizable calculator.

The thing that makes a truly brilliant programmer is the ability to manage your bad manager -- to draw out demands they're incapable of articulating.

Reminds me of Dubl-Click's calculator construction kit for classic MacOS. I spent, I think, $75 on it back when that was a lot of money for an underemployed kid; never got any real value out of it, but was fun to play with.

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1894-calculator-construc...

There were a lot of "construction kits" around that time, Bill Budge's 1982 "Pinball Construction Set" was perhaps the first. but there were things like the Adventure Construction Set, Music Construction Set, etc., that let people make their own versions of a program, typically (but not always) games, using a visual interface (even on 8-bit computers). I wonder where these things have gone. Yes, today we have things like Scratch, but that's more a programming language even if it is visual.

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

I remember seeing a screenshot of the Music Construction Set. It's fascinating how they were able to achieve such complex interface given the size/resolution of the screen and other technical limitations like memory constraints.

It also reminds me that SimCity started as a kind of city construction set. As a genre of software, it does seem related to end-user programming.

to me the converse is what's amazing: that we can waste SO MANY PIXELS while displaying even less.

I don't care that UI elements take up 4x, 9x, or 16x more pixels, or whatever, I care that user interfaces seem to be designed by people who simply do not care (or do not understand) how to convey information visually.

UIs were pretty good before Human Factors and UX people came around and needed to start justifying themselves. Now, UIs suck while looking so much better.

if UX people studied usability and utility, we would be converging on a ruleset for the perfect user interface, but instead things keep changing by larger amounts more rapidly.

Go look at the Windows User Interface Guidelines document published for application developers developing applications for Windows 95. I would like to see something of this quality today, with all of the ability to convey information that this UI paradigm allowed. A contemporary UI design standard doesn't have to look like Windows 95 at all, but it needs to be as discoverable, as complete, and as useful as this design document describes.

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M...

There is a later version of this by Microsoft for UWP applications, which even Microsoft failed to follow alarmingly often. links which should be buttons, buttons which should be links, etc. (buttons take action and links navigate, and let's keep it that way, please.)

Must have been something in the air in 1995. I often hear people mention:

Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines - http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf

Wow -- TIL Bill Budge put the code for this up on github. I had no idea!

https://github.com/billbudge/PCS_AppleII

But... Was there a construction kit construction kit?

> I wonder where these things have gone. Yes, today we have things like Scratch, but that's more a programming language even if it is visual.

RPG Maker may fit the bill - although obviously a lot more complex and capable than the Pinball Construction Set, it does not require programming. Super Mario Maker may be even more similar to the Pinball Construction Set, having a similarly limited scope.

Excellent story. Does anyone else wish we could go back to a time where designs lasted more than 2-3 years and CEOs cared a bit about it?

Here's the result: https://i.insider.com/5443c4556bb3f7f05dbaa658?width=1014

The name reminds me of the Calculus of Constructions [1], the type theory underlying proof assistant Coq.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_constructions

I missed the old Mac calculator desk accessory so much I wrote a new version of it for current Macs (you can buy it if you want at CalculatorDA.com but I wrote it for my own nostalgia purposes and use it every day). Like the version Chris Espinosa handed to Steve Jobs it has lots of options for changing the look, but they are all modern choices, like jaggy versus anti-aliased, modern traffic light window controls vs old school close box, etc. I change up the settings depending on my mood.

This reminds me of modern software that exposes all these design layout decisions to the user. Sizes of UI elements, fonts. Detailed colors. People say they love the customizability and there's a whole world of sharable themes for things. Me, I'd prefer the software had the right visual design out of the box and didn't need me configuring it.

This is not how I would define modern software. High customization was more of a trend in the late 90s to the early 00s.

People were crazy about themes, skins, custom fonts, colors, mouse cursors. Winamp was famous for that (except that "nobody wanted to see a Winamp 4 skin"). Myspace was the big social network before Facebook, and was well know for the sometimes excessive level of visual design freedom it offered to its users. It was also a time where you had dockable toolbars everywhere, customizable menus, etc...

Modern apps usually don't let you change much. I think we have a bit more customization than a decade ago, but it is not as wild as it used to be, in fact, it is rarely more than a "dark mode" toggle.

We do it all the time for UX - make everything in new UI feature customizable through command line and have them tweak it until they are happy. There are always rendering differences between their mock tools and actual devices. For example, it's impractical to render UI in same layers as the tool does, and also real time graphics drivers can not use the same algorithms as desktop image editors.

So seems just common sense, although I am sure back in the day it was a lot more effort to add development UI and have it fit in memory?

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