Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

typewritten.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–407 of 407 posts

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#401

Post by lproven »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #388
lproven wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :-)

I was an Archimedes owner and user so I didn't get to use an ST until the 1990s and an Amiga until the 2000s.

> Hm. I have a Firebee downstairs untouched.

:-o

> I am tempted to point an LLM at the MagiC sources and have it port to Coldfire :-)

I would be interested to see a video of the result!

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#402

Post by WillAdams »

lproven wrote: post #399
WillAdams wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe you. I never touched a real PenPoint device, sadly. I never got to use a real NeXT cube -- they were formidably expensive over on my side of the Atlantic, the price of a _high end_ new car before I could afford a car at all. I own an original copy of NeXTstep with manuals and have run it inside Previous, but it's not the same.

Well, the NCR-3125 I was using got donated to the Smithsonian, so there's that.... My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it.

Mac OS X of course gets one the underpinnings of NeXTstep, but the UI has gotten kind of weird since 10.6.8 which was the last version I used regularly, making me wish that there was a "No iPad influence" checkbox for the UI.

That said, I'm glad to still be able to run Macromedia FreeHand/MX, and of course, modern hardware is just magical in terms of processing power, esp. for 3D.... but the way styluses have been crippled in Windows since Fall Creator's Update makes me a little angry every time I have to toggle stylus behaviour when switching apps (I actually leave the Settings app open) --- at least Firefox has a checkbox for disabling a stylus scrolling....

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#403

Post by DVRC »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #394
pell wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked the Don Hopkins archive yet? https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/

I have now, but (especially with the article part of the website now killed in favour of the execrable Medium) it took 'DVRC’s reply above for me to realize there was more to it than it first appeared: besides https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/ there’s also https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/ (take care that the news-tape subdirectory of the former i…

Fun fact: originally "/home/NeWS" displayed "forbidden" access and I stumbled upon it by pure luck, finding the missing "operators.h" (and I told Don, since I wanted to see if there was something else missing or different, like "DumbOSI.c" which I hoped to be different from SunOSI.c). There is also an hidden file in /lib/NeWS called ".NeWS", contains the following string: "(hello) playdemo", which should kick the journal tool.

In any case, it was a "Pulcinella Secret", and anybody reading his replies on HN could easily find all his distributions, and it is replicated also on tenox.pdp-11.ru (but it's incomplete, since that there are only the contents of /home/code/NeWS".

On BitSavers there are the OpenWindows 2.0 source tapes other than the binaries (these last ones are also available inside SunOS 4.1.1 install CD, both for Sun-3 and Sun-4), but to extract them you need a specific tool, then you extract the tar dists.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#404

Post by lproven »

WillAdams wrote: post #402
lproven wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you. I never touched a real PenPoint device, sadly. I never got to use a real NeXT cube -- they were formidably expensive over on my side of the Atlantic, the price of a _high end_ new car before I could afford a car at all. I own an original copy of NeXTstep with manuals and have run it inside Previous, but it's not the same.

Well, the NCR-3125 I was using got donated to the Smithsonian, so there's that.... My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it. Mac OS X of course gets one the underpinnings of NeXTstep, but the UI has gotten kind of weird since 10.6.8 which was the last version I used regularly, making me wish that there was a "No iPad influence" checkbox for the UI. That said, I'm glad to still be able to run Macrome…

> My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it.

I played with a 30something friend's brand new ReMarkable a few years ago. I was torn between tears and rage. It is so miserable and dumb and primitive. I own 2 Newtons. The poor guy was shocked and baffled by my reaction.

Yes, I agree, Snow Leopard was peak OS X. Riccardo Mori wrote eloquently about this:

https://morrick.me/archives/9220

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#405

Post by WillAdams »

lproven wrote: post #404
WillAdams wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the NCR-3125 I was using got donated to the Smithsonian, so there's that.... My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it. Mac OS X of course gets one the underpinnings of NeXTstep, but the UI has gotten kind of weird since 10.6.8 which was the last version I used regularly, making me wish that there was a "No iPad influence" checkbox for the UI. That said, I'm glad to still be able to run Macrome…

> My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it. I played with a 30something friend's brand new ReMarkable a few years ago. I was torn between tears and rage. It is so miserable and dumb and primitive. I own 2 Newtons. The poor guy was shocked and baffled by my reaction. Yes, I agree, Snow Leopard was peak OS X. Riccardo Mori wrote eloquently about this: https://morrick.me/archives/9220

Yeah, managed to resist the ReMarkable --- the Kindle made the grade (rather than an Onyx BooX or something similar) because I already had a Paperwhite and I was pretty sure I could just default to e-book reading and get a decent value. That said, my next tech indulgence is a toss-up between either a Daylight Computer, or a Movink Pad. The DC seems like to the closest thing to a Newton alternative (other than a cell phone w/ a stylus such as my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+)

If I had managed to snag an Axiotron ModBook, I'd almost certainly still be using it w/ Snow Leopard.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#406

Post by projektfu »

SoftTalker wrote: post #299
vessenes wrote: post #95

Amazing walk through memory lane, and super useful. One big omission though - starting in the early 1990s, we should be seeing some Linux desktops in there, but I didn’t see any through 1995 or so when I stopped browsing. Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos. A nice vibe coding project…

Notably, NeXT scrollbars were also on the left edge of the window, the logic being that (at least for left-to-right languages) most people focus on the left side of the document more often. I remember liking it. I wonder why Apple swapped back to the right-hand scrollbars with OS X. I guess just because that's what classic MacOS and nearly everyone else did.

Smalltalk-80 had left-side scrollbars as well. This was one of the obvious differences when the windowing paradigm was implemented (basically de novo) for the Lisa/Mac.
Post reply on HN