> In 1986 the successor to SunView was developed, the Network extensible Window System, or NeWS.
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.
I have a vague recollection of setting up mgr on Linux back in the nineties and giving it a spin. Maybe it was bundled with Slackware? That was the era that Slackware came with the Andrew user interface system and apps as well as xview.
I knew that from some Spaniard who tried tons of WM's as a hobbyist, but he is competent enough to do some trivial patches to get them working in modern systems:
BTW, for fun, with XGopher, Gopher or Mosaic, head to gopher://hngopher.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.
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.
> I think MGR has the greatest potential for a comeback because of its unique architecture
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.
Fascinating seeing what you had to know to use these early desktops.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 28.9 ms ] threadSunView 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.
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 ?
https://galeriawm.hol.es
In Spanish, but the screenshots speak for themselves.
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:
Terminus is not Artwiz, but it's good enough.Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so mid-90's, but close.
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.
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!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600
142 points by zdw on Oct 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments