Goodbye GUI … Hello NUI (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye GUI … Hello NUI (1997)

halfhill.com

61 pointsLammy34 comments

This reminds me of ByzantineOS [1] - a small linux distro based on LFS released in 2003 that was using Mozilla browser as the interface.

[1] https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=byzantineos

It had an SNES emulator if I can recall it.

Also, the icon theme was KDE3' Slick, my favourite ever.

https://images.pling.com/img/00/00/00/04/01/1120374/732-1.jp...

An interesting compilation of buzzwords of that time. Ultimately, almost none of them stuck to the walls. I wonder if today's AI hype will look the same in 27 years?

My first year of computer science (or any university course) was in 1997. I had used a Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX81, etc in the 80s, then a break in Junior High and High School, and for several years after that, and gotten back into computers as a hobby in the mid-90s. For health reasons, I could no longer work as a cook, had been learning C from K&R's book to make it easier to build ray tracing animations, and decided to go to university for it (I had some money saved up by virtue of having no free time or social life).

I sat down a to a Sun workstation that was described as a "thin client". This was slicker than my Linux system at home (which I mostly ran as a terminal using Lynx or something to browse the web) and featured the Sun browser and blinding fast Internet. Since I was using dial up at home, this was pretty intense.

Yes, I believed the future was thin clients, web browsers for everything, and that hyper-connected devices were just around the corner. It seemed totally reasonable to me that every system would be like a Chromebook. You sit down, login, and your "system" is waiting for you just as you left it the last time you used it whether it was here, or across the world. I also imagined this experience working on your watch (I imagined a bigger watch - we had watches that you could watch TV on in the 80's - a kid in my school had one) or on what I imagined were inevitable table-top and wall sized monitors that I assumed would be ubiquitous in 10 years (surface hub comes to mind).

So this was a popular vision and one that is kind of realized today although not all the way and not quite in the way "we" (people I was reading, talking to, and hoping to become) imagined.

So today we have Google accounts suspended by corporate bots (on the grounds mostly based on output of /dev/urandom), and I wonder (looking at the sales pitch of these ideas in 1997): are we NUI yet? And if yes, can we have our GUI back please?

Frankly, idea of mainframe is much older, and never really appealed to me. I prefer a kind PCs where P is for 'personal'.

> I sat down a to a Sun workstation that was described as a "thin client". This was slicker than my Linux system at home (which I mostly ran as a terminal using Lynx or something to browse the web) and featured the Sun browser

I wonder if that was a JavaStation?

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

I don't think so, that thing was dog slow due to its Java based OS and I can't associate it in any way with the word 'slick' ;) Sun workstations without disks were also often used as thin clients. It was quite simple to boot them from the network and use an NFS root or use them as a graphical terminal.

My opinion: yes, absolutely. 99% at least. That 1% thou…

27 years? Try 5 years

> I wonder if today's AI hype will look the same in 27 years?

If the AI hype from 37 years ago is any indication (fuzzy logic on lisp machines, anyone?): Yeah. 99% of the buzzwords will be dropped because they're empty, and the remaining 1% useful ideas will vanish into the background and see continued use under new names, because they won't be sexy enough any more to be called AI.

What this article really predicated is GUI apps delivered via a web interface, which we definitely have in spades. Web components and tools like Electron have allowed "GUI" apps to become inseparable from web apps. Photoshop now runs in a browser, which would have been considered impossible at the time of the article and was, in fact, impossible until fairly recently.

The terminology didn't stick, but the idea certainly did. I think it's safe to say that more people run software delivered by a browser, over the web, than run desktop applications today. And even those who use desktop apps do a very significant portion of their work with browser-based apps.

The article explicitly called for native networked apps (Java-based, or activex based, e.g.) to bury the browser, because browsers can't be offline-first and can't be dynamic enough.

In the end, the opposite happened: After a brief profusion of native network UIs experimenting with new kinds of dynamism, browsers just absorbed their features until all other network UIs were dead.

And hopefully now we keep going on the (still slow) uptake on the local-first software [0] paradigm.

[0] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Killing flash, activex and java applets was definitely worth prioritizing.

> Photoshop now runs in a browser, which would have been considered impossible at the time of the article and was, in fact, impossible until fairly recently.

It was possible in the age of applets. But applets were just the wrong technology at the wrong time.

I remember Sun running around advocating their thin client tech. I did not understand why anyone would buy into such ultimate lock in. I understand execs have their wet dreams but it does not mean we have to follow. Same thing now happens with the cloud. Maybe at some point people / companies will realize what is going on.

Ah, yes, I remember Active X, the bloat of W98 with it, how smooth it ran with some debloaters and the nightmare security hell of Active X+OLE+COM+VBA.

I remember DCOMbobulator

https://www.grc.com/freeware/dcom.htm

Great article. They definitely spent a lot of effort to research and write this. So much so that the article can serve as a historical document.

One could argue that today's webapps with client side GUI and server side storage are precisely what Netscape predicted 17 years ago.

Is not yet working for Pharo 11 but now that I see this NUI category, is this a case for one between Smalltalk images?

https://github.com/pharo-ide/Seamless

so ChromeOS

Interesting to think how Netscape could have gone

""" Netscape's response is to arrive at a remarkably similar destination by a completely different route: Instead of hiding the browser behind the GUI, Netscape is hiding the GUI behind the browser.

Constellation is a NUI built upon what Netscape calls a "chromeless" browser. The desktop is a full-screen browser window, stripped clean of the usual menus, buttons, icons, and other widgets (the "chrome"). In effect, the browser is the desktop. Like the Active Desktop in Windows, Constellation is a container for displaying rich Web content without all the fuss and bother of a stand-alone browser program. """

Very forward thinking, considering two OSes have been built in that image since, one which is quite successful (ChromeOS, with the other being Mozilla's Firefox OS).

And modern PWAs is the same concept, just more in the presentational style of the contemporary-at-the-time HTX container format Microsoft added.

Firefox OS still lives on as the decently successful KaiOS, for really cheap feature phones. Those things are vastly popular in some countries.

There's some discussion about whether it has become abandonware though. Kai hasn't said anything since 3.0 dropped.

More than just two. WebOS would probably fall into this category too. Which would also then include LuneOS.

Electron probably deserves a mention too (since you raise the point of PWAs).

I always though webOS didn't actually use the web stack for its applications but after some reading, I guess it does, though you can also make apps using Qt.

Besides that, we just made the browser the OS to a large extent. Want to do some coding? Open browser, use an online IDE, etc.

Netscape/Mozilla was shooting for xuis which I think would have been pretty cool. Shame it never took off.

What is xuis?

I guess they mean UIs built using XUL, which is a XML-based declarative user interface markup language. Kind of an HTML variant for desktop UIs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL

There is no data. There is only XUL!

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/xpfe/xui.html

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