History Of Window Systems (2021) | Hacker News Reader

History Of Window Systems (2021)

blog.dshr.org

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The thing is, w/ Mac OS X, rather than "Display PostScript" (which was what was originally promised/intended) we ultimately got "Display PDF" (Quartz) which is an improvement in pretty much every metric which matters in the marketplace --- pretty much the only thing which was lost was nxhosting (which I still really miss).

For a hint at the backstory on this sort of thing see:

https://www.folklore.org/Origins_of_Spline-Based_and_Anti-Al...

and for the details look up Mike Paquette's posts on usenet's comp.sys.next.advocacy and similar groups.

I love DSHR's classic email of October 18, 1990 about his experience actually trying to USE the Sun Desktop Environment instead of merely showing off wizzy demos, which "somebody" leaked (blink blink sheepish grin) a long time ago. I wish I could flame as evocatively as he did in the PostScript of his email. It still perfectly applies today to so many applications and websites.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/slowlari...

  From: dshr@Eng (David Rosenthal)
  Newsgroups: sun.open-windows
  Subject: Re: Deskset environment
  Date: 18 Oct 90 17:02:39 GMT

[... timeless points about software and ui design omitted -- see the link! ...]

PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show - they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of screen real estate.

Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time? They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated.

Your focus on the whizzy demos may look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.

Although sending program to display is extremely dangerous idea, it seems it's inevitable. The next "DisplayPort" will receive byte-code to render picture, but not the pircture itself as it is right now.

It's as inevitable as what we now call "AJAX".

From "SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))":

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

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

>…(drum roll)…

>1) Used PostScript CODE instead of JavaScript for PROGRAMMING.

>2) Used PostScript GRAPHICS instead of DHTML and CSS for RENDERING.

>3) Used PostScript DATA instead of XML and JSON for DATA REPRESENTATION.

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

>[...] Also here’s a link to an article about the NeWS version of HyperTIES that we developed at HCIL, and some demos of HyperTIES and its Emacs based authoring tool, which had pie menus and embedded interactive PostScript “applets” in 1988.

>Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser

>https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-to-facilitate-brows...

>[...] HyperTIES was an early hypermedia browser and authoring tool developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab under the direction of Ben Sheniderman. (I helped develop the NeWS version of HyperTIES in PostScript, FORTH, and Emacs MockLisp on the Sun.)

>[...] Ben Shneiderman’s paper “User interface design for the Hyperties electronic encyclopedia” describes both the PC and Unix SunView window system version of HyperTIES, which we subsequently reimplemented for the Sun NeWS window system as a multimedia browser written in C, using PostScript to render and implement the user interface, and FORTH for scripting, as well as an authoring tool written in UniPress Emacs MockLisp, which we described in this paper published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117:

>[...] HyperCard inspired Arthur van Hoff to develop a network aware version of HyperCard in PostScript for James Gosling’s networked-PostScript-based NeWS Window System. It was originally called “GoodNeWS”, then called “HyperNeWS”, then finally released as a product called “HyperLook”, which I worked on with Arthur and used to port SimCity to X11/NeWS on SunOS/Solaris.

>[...] Bongo was unique at the time in that it actually let you edit and dynamically compile scripts for event handlers and “live code” at run-time (in contrast with other tools that required you to recompile and re-run the application to make changes to the user interface), which was made possible by calling back to the Java compiler (which Arthur had written before at Sun, so he knew how to integrate the compiler at runtime like a modern IDE would do). Without the ability to dynamically edit scripts at runtime (easy with an interpreted language like HyperTalk or PostScript or JavaScript, but trickier for a compiled language like Java), you can’t hold a candle to HyperCard, because interactive scripting is an essential feature.

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

>[...] HyperLook is a HyperCard-inspired graphical user interface development environment from the Turing Institute, but reinvented with networking, and programmed and rendered in PostScript code and graphics.

>[...] HyperLook was so far ahead of its time that there still isn’t anything quite like it today. But HyperCard itself has inspired many other systems like Scratch, Snap! and Lively Kernel, which go much further than HyperLook ever did in many ways, using SmallTalk or JavaScript instead of HyperTalk or PostScript.

>[...] The Axis of Eval: Code, Graphics, and Data: Structured PostScript graphics, data and code are the axis around which everything rotates.

Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...

HyperLook SimCity Demo Transcript

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcr...

>There were several streams of development which naturally influenced each other- broadly:

>Libraries [...]

>Kernel window systems [...]

>Network window systems supporting access to multiple windows from multiple address spaces on multiple machines via a network, starting from work at PARC by Bob Sproull & (if memory serves) Elaine Sonderegger, leading to Andrew, SunDew which became NeWS, and W which became X.

PIXIE was another very early networked user interface system from the University of Cambridge, which ran across the network between a PDP-7 with a Type 340 vector graphics display and light pen, and a Titan (prototype of the Atlas 2) mainframe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7

David S H Rosenthal's home town is Cambridge, and he was actually a student at Cambridge at the time, and used those same Titan and PDP-7 computers himself! So it's fair to say that PIXIE had a direct influence on his subsequent work on Andrew, X11, and NeWS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal

Here's a video of the pie menus in PIXIE:

Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

  Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles,
  PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication,
  Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton
  IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20...

  David Chapman, Cambridge University Library
  https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html

  This film demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. 
  It was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to 
  graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference 
  held in Southampton.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/EDSAC99/history.html

  1965    [...]
        Fifteen years of CAD research, initially led by C.A. Lang, began,
          using a PDP 7 and DEC Type 340 display (the first outside
          the USA) connected by data-link to the TITAN. It later 
          involved a highly innovative numerically-controlled
          machine for cutting models of metal parts in plastic foam.

  1969    [...]
        Research on screen editing under Wiseman using the PDP 7.

Digital Equipment Corporation PDP–7/A - S#126

https://www.soemtron.org/pdp7no126systeminfo.html

Software for the Titan/PDP-7 link

https://cucps.soc.srcf.net/titan/supplan/pd10.htm

> It was being willing to settle for an overly simple text format and formatting scheme — “for convenience” — that started the web media architecture off in entirely the wrong direction

Yes, in the direction of success. Simple things are adopted more eagerly. Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson are all "idea men" with very little real world software created. Resenting the actually successful systems seems to be part of their routine.

> It looks like “a hack that grew”,

YES! And all real world successful systems will.

SmallTalk was on the cusp of getting into the big leagues, with very polished IDEs available from IBM of all places. Then Java sucked out all the oxygen in the room. So Kay has bona fides. Nelson not so much.

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