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CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

worldwideweb.cern.ch

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Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#31

Post by kitsunesoba »

pavlov wrote: post #16
bluedino wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated. And the column-based file browser never appealed to me. I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land. 640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.

I remember paying $129 for Mac OS X 10.0 and it didn't feel anything like NeXT. On a supposedly state of the art Mac G4, it ran like a lobotomized sloth mostly because of the heavy new graphics stack. The giant fonts, translucent titlebars, pinstripe patterns and "lickable" candy color buttons were the aesthetic opposite of the 2-bit original NeXT.

While 10.1 did a decent job of patching up more egregious issues, 10.2 Jaguar was the first truly usable iteration of OS X, and it incidentally also brought the first bits of toning down to Aqua.

A lot of folks fondly remember Snow Leopard but for me the golden era for OS X was 10.2 - 10.4. 10.5 and 10.6 were great too, but honestly speaking I wouldn’t be bothered if I had to use a modern version of 10.4 for day to day work.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#33

Post by wnevets »

krapp wrote: post #17
sscarduzio wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how slow the actual one was

Ironically (and anecdotally) I remember pages loading much more slowly back then than now, on average. People comparing the two need to remember just how much faster and better optimized computers are now, as well as the speed of broadband versus dialup.

Modern sites have nothing on the awful experience of browsing the web on dialup.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#34

Post by geerlingguy »

bluedino wrote: post #12
pavlov wrote: post #2

It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years. Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards. 2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for vector graphics. Text labels on menus and buttons i…

The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated. And the column-based file browser never appealed to me. I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land. 640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.

> And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.

That's actually my favorite feature of the Finder and really the only thing I miss when using Windows sometimes. Using arrow keys + typing a letter or two to jump through dirs, and being able to see full hierarchy the whole time works really well with my mental model of the filesystem in a way the tree-based list view never does.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#35

Post by kgwgk »

krapp wrote: post #17
sscarduzio wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how slow the actual one was

Ironically (and anecdotally) I remember pages loading much more slowly back then than now, on average. People comparing the two need to remember just how much faster and better optimized computers are now, as well as the speed of broadband versus dialup.

Ironically? I assumed your grand-parent was joking. A top-end PC in 1990 was a 33MHz i486 with 4Mb of RAM and a 9600 bit/s modem.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#36

Post by The_Androctonus »

The actual HTTP requests this browser makes seem to be going through a proxy somewhere which I'm guessing renders the page on the server using this legacy look and returns it to be displayed. I thought it was using ajax to load pages directly from whatever URL I typed.

I'm surprised this had no support for the tag because numbered lists aren't rendering.

--

Edit: yeah I just noticed how all the links on every page have the domain part changed to worldwideweb.cern.ch.

But damn I can't help but remember Newton's "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Tim BL did not invent URIs, TCP/IP, domain names, or hypertext. He simply figured out a brilliant way to combine all these things together. Satoshi Nakamoto did not invent hashing, proof-of-work, signatures, or any of the other cryptographic protocols that make Bitcoin possible. Likewise, he simply put all these different ideas together in a brilliant way.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#37

Post by pbhjpbhj »

megous wrote: post #30
komali2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but you get the idea yea? If you sat me down at the machine ten seconds ago and said "turn on the WiFi," would "run a command in terminal that doesn't have the words network, wifi, or internet in it" really be at the top of the list of things I'd try? Edit: oh, that's some sort of ui opening command?

That's not the point of these fringe desktop environments. If you sat someone in front of custom configured i3wm, they would not have a clue how to do anything, really. The point is that the owner can have a nice customized and highly effective experience of using a computer. There's a way to configure wifi easily without an icon, with some text based menus and nmtui is one way to do it if you use NetworkManager. You…

>they would not have a clue how to do anything, really //

Ha, used a little MacBook for essentially the first time 2 days ago, it was being used to present a slideshow (MS Powerpoint). I tried to advance beyond the end of the slide stack and it closed to the editor [terrible UX for me, IMO it should blank the screen and show a message on the laptop; maybe that's the default, wasn't my machine obvs], I was completely lost trying to scroll the slide chooser (left pane) as there was no scroll bar, and no pgup/pgdn keys, click-scroll [which works in other UI that I use] was rearranging the slides instead of scrolling. It's so easy to get lost in unfamiliar UI.

We can easily adapt if we want to, however.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#38

Post by pavlov »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #31
pavlov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember paying $129 for Mac OS X 10.0 and it didn't feel anything like NeXT. On a supposedly state of the art Mac G4, it ran like a lobotomized sloth mostly because of the heavy new graphics stack. The giant fonts, translucent titlebars, pinstripe patterns and "lickable" candy color buttons were the aesthetic opposite of the 2-bit original NeXT.

While 10.1 did a decent job of patching up more egregious issues, 10.2 Jaguar was the first truly usable iteration of OS X, and it incidentally also brought the first bits of toning down to Aqua. A lot of folks fondly remember Snow Leopard but for me the golden era for OS X was 10.2 - 10.4. 10.5 and 10.6 were great too, but honestly speaking I wouldn’t be bothered if I had to use a modern version of 10.4 for day to d…

Agreed, 10.4 Tiger was the high point.

IIRC, Leopard was a bit of a disappointment. It was delayed because they moved engineers to work on the first iPhone... And that's pretty much when Mac stopped being a priority at Apple.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#39

Post by The_Androctonus »

jack_jennings wrote: post #13

A bit more information about the typeface created for this project, which is open source: https://github.com/djrrb/CERN-www-fonts/blob/master/README.m... (The type world being a small one, this design had assistance from David Jonathan Ross, the designer of the Input coding typeface)

Your link leads to a 404.
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