Anyone here remember dos? The og CLI bases OS
I offer a modern distro of a DOS. :-) So yes.
Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
381–390 of 407 posts
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#382GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. I first saw this on a friends' parents computer and was quite astonished why computers may look like that. I was very used to Windows/DOS back then. I am also glad to have switched to Linux in 2004 already. Once you have been using Linux for a while, whenever I use windows I am annoyed at how slow it is. Just file copy operations alone and then…
> GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems.
Yes, it does. So much so that Apple noticed and sued.
I gave some links in:
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Need to find the time to try that out on a Raspberry Pi....
You really do. It is pretty much a work of art. I have tried to persuade people a few times now. This may amuse. 2022: https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3... 2024: https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open... I wish I could get the senior GNOME team to use RISC OS for a while. It is so very visible that GNOME >= 3.x is a Windows copy with things removed and re-arranged, bec…
For me, my high-water mark for GUI experience/consistency was using Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS on an NCR-3125 when mobile, and a NeXT Cube (w/ a Wacom ArtZ) when at my desk --- nothing since has been as nice and consistent and reliable.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#384I was looking for Atari TOS
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast. For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3…
> I don't know what happened to GEM. Choosing to interpret you literally: Apple sued, and DR had to cripple GEM 2. The Atari ST version was unaffected. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/01/business/digital-research... https://books.google.im/books?id=w3IudMVoEusC&pg=PA2&redir_e... Caldera made it GPL in 1999. https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1999/04/27/gem-the-gui-t... The FreeGEM project modernised it and added bac…
One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Not just the EmuTOS stuff which is itself amazing. Commercial ones (now open sourced!) like MagiC but then XaAES and so on.
You can even run MagiC on Linux now:
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ooo, a rare fellow home RISC OS user! I had an A3000 at home myself so I didn't have the benefit of using RISC OS with a hard drive, and we never upgraded to an ARM3, but we did use both RISC OS 2 and 3. Still love the old Acorn machines. I mostly use Arculator[0] nowadays for that nostalgia though. [0] https://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/
Brilliant. Yeah there were a few of us back in the day! Had an A440 then a RiscPC 700 here. Hard disk made all the difference even if it was only a 40MB one! There's a nice emulator here, a WebAssembly RiscPC one. Works quite well: https://rpcemu.m-h.org.uk/
I have a local version of RPCemu too, but I never had a Risc PC myself so it's not as interesting to me; we got a PC about half a year after Windows 95 released.
Have you come across the Stardot[0] community yet? I feel like you'd enjoy it. Fair warning: it's more focused on the Acorn computers themselves (both 8-bit and 26/32-bit) than the continuing development of RISC OS. That said, I personally think it's great.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know what happened to GEM. Choosing to interpret you literally: Apple sued, and DR had to cripple GEM 2. The Atari ST version was unaffected. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/01/business/digital-research... https://books.google.im/books?id=w3IudMVoEusC&pg=PA2&redir_e... Caldera made it GPL in 1999. https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1999/04/27/gem-the-gui-t... The FreeGEM project modernised it and added bac…
One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Not just the EmuTOS stuff which is itself amazing. Commercial ones (now open sourced!) like MagiC but then XaAES and so on. http://xaaes.gokmase.com/ You can even run MagiC on Linux now: https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/magiclinux
> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations.
Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translation, and stuff like that. I ended up learning a lot about the history of ST GEM, and one aspect was how its cleanly-layered design let people just re-implement bits and plug them back into the original.
Which is what led to FreeMINT and TOS 4, and the desire for a FOSS distro of that is what led to AFROS.
> You can even run MagiC on Linux now
Oh! I knew he'd open-sourced it. I did mention MagiC in passing in my follow-up to Nemanja's history:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html
I didn't realise there had been recent activity. I must try it. Thank you!
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Not just the EmuTOS stuff which is itself amazing. Commercial ones (now open sourced!) like MagiC but then XaAES and so on. http://xaaes.gokmase.com/ You can even run MagiC on Linux now: https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/magiclinux
> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translation, and stuff like that. I ended up learning a lot about the history of ST GEM, and one aspect was how its cleanly-layered design let people just re-implement bits and plug them back into the original. Which is what led to F…
Being in the North American sphere and distinctly post-Atari by the mid 90s, I didn't really know about MagiC until much later. It's pretty amazing what he built!
Too bad it's 100% assembler. Though very nicely written assembler.
Hm. I have a Firebee downstairs untouched. I am tempted to point an LLM at the MagiC sources and have it port to Coldfire :-)
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#389You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.
They're getting better with time relative to modern GUIs.
I wasn't a big fan of Windows 3.1 or Motif in their heyday, but compared to the visual chaos we have nowadays they're looking pretty good.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they do it correctly there's plenty of free space in the titlebar for grabbing. That's how it works in GTK+3 and later for example.
But it causes cognitive overhead: you need to think about which bits of the title-cum-button bar are safe to grab, as opposed to which overloaded and do other things, which are possibly useful. I use Firefox. I also use macOS a lot. Firefox assumes your tabs are horizontal. Mine are not (using a built in feature). So it doesn't use the title bar much. So there's an option to turn it off. It's off by default. Result,…
If there'a a visible title label, that's obviously safe for grabbing. Firefox is probably doing it wrong by not leaving some visible space for users to grab at things.