Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)
oldvcr.blogspot.com
oldvcr.blogspot.com
Also, if you want a 'modern' Motif desktop mimicking the mid-90's, install emwm, xfile, classic-colors, xpdf (the old Motif) one, XImaginag and Nedit for XFT.
https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
For a 'browser' you can use BFG, it runs gopher/gemini and gopher://magical.fish, gemini://gemi.dev and gopher://hnhgopher.com will look fine:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG
For IRC and Usenet, just use any terminal IRC client against libera.chat (it will look the exact same under XTerm) and... SLRN against the servers from https://eternal-september.org
And, as for Emacs, just install/build Lucid Emacs, get a nice Unicode font such as Go for sans as monospaced variants, it will look 100% close to Lucida fonts.
At ~/.Xdefaults:
emacs.pane.menubar.font: Go-9 emacs.font: Go-9 emacs.fontSet: Go-9
At ~/.emacs:
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Terminus" :height 100)
;; Proportionately spaced typeface
(set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "Go" :height 1.0)
;; Monospaced typeface
(set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Terminus" :height 1.0)
Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so mid-90's, but close.
All these desktop environments start out blank. By contrast modern desktop environments help you understand what you can do by showing always-present visual guides, cues to what’s running now, & launchers. Windows 95’s Start Menu is the most iconic tipping point for the trend of making it easy to see what you can do with your computer.
Current LLMs show a blinking cursor. Yes they can call tools, run code, and generate images in styles you’ll only know to ask for it you’re an art expert. But right now you have to know those capabilities exist. Even experts forget to use them at times. And novices get frustrated that an LLM can’t sort a list of names - even though all they have to do is ask it to write code for itself and the task will be easy.
What will the AI “Start Menu” be!
SunView with NeWS was a powerful 2D graphics engine. It ran Adobe Display PostScript. The Sun workstations ran BSD unix, had good networking, protected memory, virtual memory and so on. And it did all that with 16 MB of memory. That's not a typo... 16 megabytes. Today our computers have 1000 times more RAM, but do our computers work better? Hardly. The NCD terminals from 1990 worked just as well as Chromebooks today. What have we accomplished in the last 35 years? Computers back then weren't powerful enough to play movies. Other than that I can't think of much I would miss if I had to go back to the old NCDs.
Somehow, in the 90's, the reverse with libre software happened: Rxvt, xvt, fvwm... were far lighter and featureful than plain TWM, XTerm's and whatnot.
As now, same back then .. software developers tended to max out the capabilities of their machines. Which we were often on the whole beefier than what the general community had.
If you actually go back and use software from the 90s on 90s machines, it's amazing how slow the experience can be. Input latencies are often better, but .. throughput awful. Start up times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading... which we just accepted along with the sound of a grinding hard drive or floppy disk.
With 16MB of RAM, and FVWM and RXvt (xvt before) ran circles around a Sparc with CDE and DTTerm/Xterm.
Wellcome to Windows 11 /s
Can't wait for DonHopkins to magically appear and infodump about NeWS and his involvement therewith, copypasta-ing entire email threads and even a PostScript pie menu implementation.
By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to XT such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a lot. Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.
If any, by 2025 Gnome would kill any GJS usage to parts of Mutter would be reimplemented in either Vala or Rust getting a big performance boost. BcacheFS would be a stable thing making EXT4 something to be legacied in years. Even the open release of JFS was incredible; a journaling FS being much better for old CPU's than EXT3...
Today we are seeing the opposite trend.
For X11, sure (but even then there were systems that ran circles around X11 in half a meg of RAM).
But not for NeWS.
Just do an ldd on a random program on your machine. Or check how many libraries are doing the same thing (SSL, jpeg, NSS, etc).
If you are really brave, you can compare a "make menuconfig" between linux 2.4.x and linux 4.x.
Do we need all this ?
In Spanish, but the screenshots speak for themselves.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600
142 points by zdw on Oct 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments
I think so too. But this time with modern drawing primitives. Instead of lines an circles we need shaders and textures.
In the end, even the most modern UI is nothing more than a terminal: Low bandwidth input from keyboard and mouse events and low bandwidth output (like draw checkbox at x,y). The rest is done by some drawing or blit routine which can be entirely managed on the GPU.
It's an interesting model, a path not taken.
I remember exactly where I got it from - InfoMagic’s 1994 Linux Annual 4 volume CD-ROM set. Although that did contain Slackware, I’m not sure if it actually was a Slackware package. The CD-ROM set included dumps of Sunsite and TSX-11, and I think maybe it was from one of those.
This CD-ROM set went through a few different editions, and Internet Archive has some of them, but not sure if it has the exact one I had - which I still have somewhere, I should probably try imaging it (assuming it is still readable decades later)