Gallery of programming UIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Gallery of programming UIs

#121

Post by DuncanMak » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 2:43 AM UTC

mikelevins wrote: post #113

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #106

Nice set of pictures. I was surprised not to see two things about Common Lisp: Symbolics's Genera UI for software engineering, and the modern Paredit editor methodology for Lisps.

Yeah it would have been nice to see Genera. It was interesting and distinctive. It does show SK8, which, although it's not obvious from looking at it, was a Lisp environment. It was implemented in Common Lisp--specifically Macintosh Common Lisp, which is the direct ancestor of Clozure Common Lisp--on the pre-OSX Mac system. That's sort of obvious if you look at the menubar in Slide 7. The ScriptEditor shows a snippet…

Hey Mikel, are the Sk8 sources/binaries anywhere? Is it possible to run Sk8 nowadays if one has access to hardware running classic MacOS?

Re: Gallery of programming UIs

#122

Post by mikelevins » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

DuncanMak wrote: post #121

mikelevins wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it would have been nice to see Genera. It was interesting and distinctive. It does show SK8, which, although it's not obvious from looking at it, was a Lisp environment. It was implemented in Common Lisp--specifically Macintosh Common Lisp, which is the direct ancestor of Clozure Common Lisp--on the pre-OSX Mac system. That's sort of obvious if you look at the menubar in Slide 7. The ScriptEditor shows a snippet…

Hey Mikel, are the Sk8 sources/binaries anywhere? Is it possible to run Sk8 nowadays if one has access to hardware running classic MacOS?

There seems to be a copy of one of the technology releases here:

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2625-apple-sk8

I haven't downloaded it and looked at it.

One of the slides at that URL has Dave Yost's Clint Eastwood fillColor displayed in it. :-)

I think you can run it as long as you have a PPC machine. Perhaps one of the Mac OS emulators that emulates the PPC could do it, too, if you had the ROM files.

In case you're not familiar with ROM files, the old Mac OS, before OSX, was not really an operating system in the usual sense; it was really a large subroutine library, the bulk of which was burned into ROMs in Apple hardware. Emulators for the old Mac OS need to have working copies of the contents of those ROMs in order to run the Mac OS. ROM files are a little bit inconvenient to come by unless you have an old working Mac and a tool for copying the ROMs.

Way back in 2004 I proposed an open-source project to build a new SK8-like environment, and even got buy-in from some of the original developers and users of SK8. Then I got terribly sick and didn't work on anything at all for a couple of years. When I finally began to work again, it was with a lot less energy and ambition than I'd had before.

Re: Gallery of programming UIs

#123

Post by eschaton » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:30 AM UTC

mikelevins wrote: post #122

DuncanMak wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Mikel, are the Sk8 sources/binaries anywhere? Is it possible to run Sk8 nowadays if one has access to hardware running classic MacOS?

There seems to be a copy of one of the technology releases here: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2625-apple-sk8 I haven't downloaded it and looked at it. One of the slides at that URL has Dave Yost's Clint Eastwood fillColor displayed in it. :-) I think you can run it as long as you have a PPC machine. Perhaps one of the Mac OS emulators that emulates the PPC could do it, too, if you had the ROM files. In case yo…

Apple made the source for SK8 available, and someone has posted it on GitHub:

https://github.com/waywardmonkeys/apple_sk8

Re: Gallery of programming UIs

#124

Post by mikelevins » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 10:34 AM UTC

eschaton wrote: post #123

mikelevins wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a copy of one of the technology releases here: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2625-apple-sk8 I haven't downloaded it and looked at it. One of the slides at that URL has Dave Yost's Clint Eastwood fillColor displayed in it. :-) I think you can run it as long as you have a PPC machine. Perhaps one of the Mac OS emulators that emulates the PPC could do it, too, if you had the ROM files. In case yo…

Apple made the source for SK8 available, and someone has posted it on GitHub: https://github.com/waywardmonkeys/apple_sk8

Nice; thanks!

If you want to build it you'll need a working copy of MCL and a PPC mac. The requirements may be slightly narrower than that. SK8 had some low-level bits that might rely on some details of the Mac System version or hardware. I don't rememberenough of the details anymore, but you might need to try a few different PPC models and system versions. System 7 or 8 is probably a decent bet, as is any mac hardware that was shipped with it.