8 ms·

I'm a little surprised by some basic facts the article gets wrong. - WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987. Tim Berners-Lee released it in December 1990, based

I'm a little surprised by some basic facts the article gets wrong. - WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987. Tim Berners-Lee released it in December 1990, based on a proposal he developed in 1989 [1]. - Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have hyperlinks. It also did not have overlapping windows. [2] That second screenshot is of Windows 2, (from December 1987) showing the "Help" system, which did use underlined hyperlinks, from 1989. It makes me question the thoroughness of their research at all. > What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. ... I like to imagine that Cello and Mosaic were both inspired by the same trends happening in user interface design at the time. My theory is that Windows 3.1 had just come out. What? No! These are grad students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the 1990s on big powerful Unix workstations [3]. I highly doubt the UI choices of Window 3 were relevant or closely watched by that team. 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Career_and_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Career_and_res... 2- https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-of-strike-outs/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-o... 3- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)#History

setpatchaddress 5y ago
“ Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design featured green text on a black background.” Yeah. All you need to know about this article.
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  Gosh I could have sworn I remember it being amber text on a black background.
  - daveslash 5y ago
    Yeah, I think the point that @setpatchaddress was trying to make was that the author is confusing the color of the monitor itself with the color prescribed by the software. Thus, take the accuracy of the entire article with a big grain of salt. That's how I understood the comment.... Monochrome monitors were often either green or amber or white. If the monitor used P1 Phosphor, then it was green, P3 Phosphor was amber, and P4 Phosphor was white. So the color of the text on the screen was a reflection of the hardware spec/design, not of the software.
    - setpatchaddress 5y ago
      Indeed, apologies for being terse. I suspect @nsxwolf understood that, though.
      - daveslash 5y ago
        Re>> "I suspect @nsxwolf understood that, though." You're probably right. I still struggle with tone sometimes. I'm still getting used to this whole "Internet" thing... ;-)
    - timw4mail 5y ago
      So what color was P2 Phosphor?
      - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        Blue-green. Check standard phosphor types section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor
      - daveslash 5y ago
        My first response was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- but I dug some more and found out that P2 is a Blue-Green color used in oscilloscopes, but it doesn't look like monochrome computer monitors were ever made for it though [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_typ...
        duskwuff 5y ago
        P2 was a long persistence phosphor. It was used in analog oscilloscopes because those couldn't be refreshed -- the waveform was drawn onto the display as it was received, and the phosphor was responsible for making that visible. You wouldn't want that in a computer monitor. The computer is perfectly capable of refreshing the monitor, and the long duration of the phosphor would make anything rapidly changing (like a scrolling display) impossible to read because all of the previous contents would interfere with the current image.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    The VTs I've used on VMS were amber.
    - anonymousiam 5y ago
      Probably a VT220. IIRC those had amber screen phosphor. The VT100 had white.
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    I was "that guy" during those days and insisted on buying a monochrome CRT (which at that time was just a CRT, since your only choice WAS which "chrome" you chose for your monochrome) whose text was kind of pastel white. It was glorious.
- city41 5y ago
  I also found noting the Linux kernel's color schemes as rather odd.
  - cpach 5y ago
    Same here, considering that there were lots of prior art for white text on black background.
  - fsiefken 5y ago
    Yes, now that you mention it. MS-DOS 5.0 (which predated the first Linux release a few months in 1991) had a nice grey text on blue background for EDIT.COM (or was it exe?) and QBASIC.EXE. and NC.EXE (Norton Commander). Netscape and Mosaic inverted this color scheme with a grey background and blue hyperlinked text. COINCIDENCE? PERHAPS NOT! I grew up with MS-DOS and 4M of RAM, perhaps I should make a tiny VM with Windows 3.11 and Netscape to revisit these days and try to get my Jekyll blog running on it (served from CERN httpd or the popular webserver at the time). Not sure if VirtualBox virtual network adapter can be recognized by Windows 3.11. Perhaps someone can backport a Gemini browser to Windows 3.11.. perhaps someone can backport a modern WWW browser to Windows 3.11! edit: someone provided VM's already! Just 33M for DOS622+WIN311 (but still a lot of floppies). I disabled the default USB support and the startup to GUI is ~5s. EDIT.COM has a "hypertext" links in it consisting of 2 little green arrows, 1 triangle rotated left on the left side and 1 right on the right side. The grey on black text is not underlined. http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html
- zabatuvajdka 5y ago
  I think the article is more of a musing than a mathematical proof… I mean who has the time to deep dive into 100% historical accuracy of these things. I thought it was a neat look at a historical context of something mundane like a hyperlink.
  - Hublium 5y ago
    The whole thing felt like "intern from high school searches for 'old computer screenshots' with Google Image Search and comment on what they found".
    - zabatuvajdka 5y ago
      Hence the musing… when you muse about something you want to keep it loose exploration no?
  - allturtles 5y ago
    No one has time to bother caring about the past, and we should be grateful that someone half-assed it (at best)? I strongly disagree with this premise, there are plenty of people out there taking the past seriously and "full-assing" it.
    - zabatuvajdka 5y ago
      I’m not trivializing history just calling out all the pundits who armchair complain about people’s good-natured blog posts.
  - theodric 5y ago
    Someone purportedly writing authoritatively for an audience. You don't get to just invent history out of whole cloth because you "don't have time." If you don't have time to write a factual article, you don't have time to write an article. So now this piece of crap is out there on the internet for the rest of time, permanently memorializing completely nonfactual statements. Fake news. Literal definition of. Wonderful.
purge 5y ago
The second screenshot is from windows 2, which was released in 1987
- billyhoffman 5y ago
  Ahhh! Good catchup. I thought those "minimize" and "maximize" icons looked odd. Updated
dbt00 5y ago
I'm quite sure that students, even grad students, at UIUC, had lots of access to windows based computers in 1993. Just because they weren't doing their work on them didn't mean they didn't have PCs running DOS or Windows (and maybe dual booting Linux).
- dotancohen 5y ago
  They were most certainly not dual booting Linux in 1993.
  - tingletech 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure we were dual booting linux in 1993, why were we certainly not?
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      I think you could barely fit one OS in your 64MB hard drive at the time…
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - Kye 5y ago
        Windows 3.11 (1993) was ~15MB once installed.
      - bluedino 5y ago
        Computers came in towers back then which could contain many hard drives
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        250MB was common by then and Linux distros only took up a dozenish MB. Lilo existed by then and everyone dual booted to DOS/Win3. If you didn't want to modify the MBR you could boot Linux from DOS with loadlin.exe.
arc-in-space 5y ago
This article is poorly written, I was expecting an interesting investigation but stopped reading halfway through. Here's a bunch of underdescribed things with non-blue hyperlinks, and some completely unrelated ones that didn't even have hyperlinks. The answer to the headline could have been made in one sentence and there would have been no loss of value.
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  > The answer to the headline could have been made in one sentence and there would have been no loss of value. That sentence would be "I have literally no idea, it seems completely arbitrary." There really isn't any value worth preserving, it's just misinformed commentary on a bunch of screenshots taken while the author was probably in diapers.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Well, it does follow the Best Practices for Getting the Right Answer on the Internet protocol. (a/k/a Cunningham's Law)
deathanatos 5y ago
I also disagreed with, > Here Microsoft uses the “hyperlink blue” for active states when a user clicks on different drives, folders and icons. Hyperlink blue was a much brighter blue (pure blue, on the interfaces I used, but I was a litter later in the timeline) than Window's blue, which was a (noticeably) darker blue.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Yeah, if I were to 'pick' a reason it would be that it worked in the EGA colorspace. You did not exactly get a huge range of colors there. While in 1993 256 (small screen res) or 'truecolor' (very expensive vid card) was not unheard of but it was decently uncommon on low end hardware.
pdw 5y ago
For all their talking about early Windows versions, they missed that Windows 3 introduced a hypertext help system. It used green links. This is what it looked like: http://toastytech.com/guis/win30help.png http://toastytech.com/guis/win30help.png
- pedroma 5y ago
  That's a nice looking color.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  I guffawed at "I do not believe that this is the first instance of the blue hyperlink since this color is cyan, and not dark blue." No Blue Scotsman! Tim Berners-Lee told Ben Shneiderman at the time that he was influenced by the design of the HyperTIES-based "Hypertext on Hypertext" project from the 1987 HyperText conference that the ACM published, which had light blue links. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104 >My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted. >His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a significant user interface improvement over early systems such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.
- fsiefken 5y ago
  Ah that's probably why the color green is also in the EDIT.COM hypertext arrow links in the MSDOS 5.0 Help menu in 1991.
- kbelder 5y ago
  Windows help functionality has been declining ever since. Those old help files were so clean and snappy, well-organized and searchable. Now, I dread accidently pressing F1 in any major windows app.
duskwuff 5y ago
They're also pretty seriously wrong about HyperCard: > Apple brought color to its HyperCards, but notably, the text links were still black and not blue. HyperCard never natively supported any form of "text links". You could make a button with a text label, or a transparent button hovering over text, but there was no way to attach a behavior to a span of styled text without a lot of custom scripting. (And, for what it's worth, the color XCMD for HyperCard never really caught on. It was a late addition, and never felt entirely like a native part of the application. Even when it was available, most users kept on authoring stacks in black and white.) > However, some UI elements did have blue accents when interacted upon I have no idea what the author is referring to here. Possibly the blue tint in the system UI (like window titlebars), which has nothing to do with HyperCard and didn't apply to its in-app UI?
- II2II 5y ago
  > I have no idea what the author is referring to here. Possibly the blue tint in the system UI (like window titlebars) I get the impression that the author was trying to answer two questions, the second being: where did the color blue come from? I was also under the impression that the color XCMD was not a part of HyperCard and was created by a third party, but I could be wrong there since it has been over 20 years since I've used HyperCard.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    There were a couple of different color solutions for HyperCard, but the official one (Color Tools) was released with HyperCard 2.3. The window tint in System 7 was a user preference. The purplish blue seen in the screenshot was the default color, but there were about a dozen other options. In any event, it seems a stretch to assume that Apple's choice of this color influenced Mosaic in choosing a different blue color for a different purpose.
Stratoscope 5y ago
> Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have...overlapping windows. Actually Windows 1.0 did have overlapping windows. They just weren't the default style for application windows. But there were popup windows that overlapped other windows on the screen. These were typically used for dialog and message boxes, for example the End Session message box midway through that filfre.net article. There was nothing stopping anyone from using a popup-style window for their application, and adding a titlebar so you could move it around on the screen. It just wasn't the custom, and people would think your app was weird if it did that. And on a typical system of the day (no GPU!), dragging your window around on the screen would perform rather poorly.
- billyhoffman 5y ago
  Great catch! I had read that Digital Antiquarian piece a few months back and had remembered about the "sub windows" that an app could have. But I had thought they were scoped to just be on top of the window for the app that spawned it, and couldn't leave that "tile." However, you are totally right. This image right here clearly shows it overlapping another application's tiled window. https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-of-strike-outs/win8/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-o... This is the best kind of correct: technically correct!
rufus_foreman 5y ago
>> WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987 WorldWideWeb was created by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
- cxr 5y ago
  This is a reference to a bizarre anachronism in David Graeber's writing. The conflict over this passage once carried over to the comments here on HN while Graeber was still alive, and he and a longtime foe quarreled about it to a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion.
slightwinder 5y ago
The part about project xanadu is also shady. They list it as 1964, but first paper was published 1965, while their idea of hypertext was born 1960, with the word choosen 1963. Not sure where the 1964 comes from. Not to mention that this wasn't even an actual implementation. It's disputable whether xanadu really should be the first one to mention here. The ideas of referencing documents is older and has previous implementations in analog world. It they wanna go just about hypertext, they should at least started with memex.

setpatchaddress 5y ago

“ Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design featured green text on a black background.” Yeah. All you need to know about this article.

nsxwolf 5y ago
Gosh I could have sworn I remember it being amber text on a black background.
- daveslash 5y ago
  Yeah, I think the point that @setpatchaddress was trying to make was that the author is confusing the color of the monitor itself with the color prescribed by the software. Thus, take the accuracy of the entire article with a big grain of salt. That's how I understood the comment.... Monochrome monitors were often either green or amber or white. If the monitor used P1 Phosphor, then it was green, P3 Phosphor was amber, and P4 Phosphor was white. So the color of the text on the screen was a reflection of the hardware spec/design, not of the software.
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    Indeed, apologies for being terse. I suspect @nsxwolf understood that, though.
    - daveslash 5y ago
      Re>> "I suspect @nsxwolf understood that, though." You're probably right. I still struggle with tone sometimes. I'm still getting used to this whole "Internet" thing... ;-)
  - timw4mail 5y ago
    So what color was P2 Phosphor?
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Blue-green. Check standard phosphor types section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor
    - daveslash 5y ago
      My first response was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- but I dug some more and found out that P2 is a Blue-Green color used in oscilloscopes, but it doesn't look like monochrome computer monitors were ever made for it though [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_typ...
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        P2 was a long persistence phosphor. It was used in analog oscilloscopes because those couldn't be refreshed -- the waveform was drawn onto the display as it was received, and the phosphor was responsible for making that visible. You wouldn't want that in a computer monitor. The computer is perfectly capable of refreshing the monitor, and the long duration of the phosphor would make anything rapidly changing (like a scrolling display) impossible to read because all of the previous contents would interfere with the current image.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  The VTs I've used on VMS were amber.
  - anonymousiam 5y ago
    Probably a VT220. IIRC those had amber screen phosphor. The VT100 had white.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  I was "that guy" during those days and insisted on buying a monochrome CRT (which at that time was just a CRT, since your only choice WAS which "chrome" you chose for your monochrome) whose text was kind of pastel white. It was glorious.
city41 5y ago
I also found noting the Linux kernel's color schemes as rather odd.
- cpach 5y ago
  Same here, considering that there were lots of prior art for white text on black background.
- fsiefken 5y ago
  Yes, now that you mention it. MS-DOS 5.0 (which predated the first Linux release a few months in 1991) had a nice grey text on blue background for EDIT.COM (or was it exe?) and QBASIC.EXE. and NC.EXE (Norton Commander). Netscape and Mosaic inverted this color scheme with a grey background and blue hyperlinked text. COINCIDENCE? PERHAPS NOT! I grew up with MS-DOS and 4M of RAM, perhaps I should make a tiny VM with Windows 3.11 and Netscape to revisit these days and try to get my Jekyll blog running on it (served from CERN httpd or the popular webserver at the time). Not sure if VirtualBox virtual network adapter can be recognized by Windows 3.11. Perhaps someone can backport a Gemini browser to Windows 3.11.. perhaps someone can backport a modern WWW browser to Windows 3.11! edit: someone provided VM's already! Just 33M for DOS622+WIN311 (but still a lot of floppies). I disabled the default USB support and the startup to GUI is ~5s. EDIT.COM has a "hypertext" links in it consisting of 2 little green arrows, 1 triangle rotated left on the left side and 1 right on the right side. The grey on black text is not underlined. http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html
zabatuvajdka 5y ago
I think the article is more of a musing than a mathematical proof… I mean who has the time to deep dive into 100% historical accuracy of these things. I thought it was a neat look at a historical context of something mundane like a hyperlink.
- Hublium 5y ago
  The whole thing felt like "intern from high school searches for 'old computer screenshots' with Google Image Search and comment on what they found".
  - zabatuvajdka 5y ago
    Hence the musing… when you muse about something you want to keep it loose exploration no?
- allturtles 5y ago
  No one has time to bother caring about the past, and we should be grateful that someone half-assed it (at best)? I strongly disagree with this premise, there are plenty of people out there taking the past seriously and "full-assing" it.
  - zabatuvajdka 5y ago
    I’m not trivializing history just calling out all the pundits who armchair complain about people’s good-natured blog posts.
- theodric 5y ago
  Someone purportedly writing authoritatively for an audience. You don't get to just invent history out of whole cloth because you "don't have time." If you don't have time to write a factual article, you don't have time to write an article. So now this piece of crap is out there on the internet for the rest of time, permanently memorializing completely nonfactual statements. Fake news. Literal definition of. Wonderful.

purge 5y ago

The second screenshot is from windows 2, which was released in 1987

billyhoffman 5y ago
Ahhh! Good catchup. I thought those "minimize" and "maximize" icons looked odd. Updated

dbt00 5y ago

I'm quite sure that students, even grad students, at UIUC, had lots of access to windows based computers in 1993. Just because they weren't doing their work on them didn't mean they didn't have PCs running DOS or Windows (and maybe dual booting Linux).

dotancohen 5y ago
They were most certainly not dual booting Linux in 1993.
- tingletech 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure we were dual booting linux in 1993, why were we certainly not?
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    I think you could barely fit one OS in your 64MB hard drive at the time…
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kye 5y ago
      Windows 3.11 (1993) was ~15MB once installed.
    - bluedino 5y ago
      Computers came in towers back then which could contain many hard drives
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      250MB was common by then and Linux distros only took up a dozenish MB. Lilo existed by then and everyone dual booted to DOS/Win3. If you didn't want to modify the MBR you could boot Linux from DOS with loadlin.exe.

arc-in-space 5y ago

This article is poorly written, I was expecting an interesting investigation but stopped reading halfway through. Here's a bunch of underdescribed things with non-blue hyperlinks, and some completely unrelated ones that didn't even have hyperlinks. The answer to the headline could have been made in one sentence and there would have been no loss of value.

addingnumbers 5y ago
> The answer to the headline could have been made in one sentence and there would have been no loss of value. That sentence would be "I have literally no idea, it seems completely arbitrary." There really isn't any value worth preserving, it's just misinformed commentary on a bunch of screenshots taken while the author was probably in diapers.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Well, it does follow the Best Practices for Getting the Right Answer on the Internet protocol. (a/k/a Cunningham's Law)

deathanatos 5y ago

I also disagreed with, > Here Microsoft uses the “hyperlink blue” for active states when a user clicks on different drives, folders and icons. Hyperlink blue was a much brighter blue (pure blue, on the interfaces I used, but I was a litter later in the timeline) than Window's blue, which was a (noticeably) darker blue.

sumtechguy 5y ago
Yeah, if I were to 'pick' a reason it would be that it worked in the EGA colorspace. You did not exactly get a huge range of colors there. While in 1993 256 (small screen res) or 'truecolor' (very expensive vid card) was not unheard of but it was decently uncommon on low end hardware.

pdw 5y ago

For all their talking about early Windows versions, they missed that Windows 3 introduced a hypertext help system. It used green links. This is what it looked like: http://toastytech.com/guis/win30help.png http://toastytech.com/guis/win30help.png

pedroma 5y ago
That's a nice looking color.
DonHopkins 5y ago
I guffawed at "I do not believe that this is the first instance of the blue hyperlink since this color is cyan, and not dark blue." No Blue Scotsman! Tim Berners-Lee told Ben Shneiderman at the time that he was influenced by the design of the HyperTIES-based "Hypertext on Hypertext" project from the 1987 HyperText conference that the ACM published, which had light blue links. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104 >My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted. >His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a significant user interface improvement over early systems such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.
fsiefken 5y ago
Ah that's probably why the color green is also in the EDIT.COM hypertext arrow links in the MSDOS 5.0 Help menu in 1991.
kbelder 5y ago
Windows help functionality has been declining ever since. Those old help files were so clean and snappy, well-organized and searchable. Now, I dread accidently pressing F1 in any major windows app.

duskwuff 5y ago

They're also pretty seriously wrong about HyperCard: > Apple brought color to its HyperCards, but notably, the text links were still black and not blue. HyperCard never natively supported any form of "text links". You could make a button with a text label, or a transparent button hovering over text, but there was no way to attach a behavior to a span of styled text without a lot of custom scripting. (And, for what it's worth, the color XCMD for HyperCard never really caught on. It was a late addition, and never felt entirely like a native part of the application. Even when it was available, most users kept on authoring stacks in black and white.) > However, some UI elements did have blue accents when interacted upon I have no idea what the author is referring to here. Possibly the blue tint in the system UI (like window titlebars), which has nothing to do with HyperCard and didn't apply to its in-app UI?

II2II 5y ago
> I have no idea what the author is referring to here. Possibly the blue tint in the system UI (like window titlebars) I get the impression that the author was trying to answer two questions, the second being: where did the color blue come from? I was also under the impression that the color XCMD was not a part of HyperCard and was created by a third party, but I could be wrong there since it has been over 20 years since I've used HyperCard.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  There were a couple of different color solutions for HyperCard, but the official one (Color Tools) was released with HyperCard 2.3. The window tint in System 7 was a user preference. The purplish blue seen in the screenshot was the default color, but there were about a dozen other options. In any event, it seems a stretch to assume that Apple's choice of this color influenced Mosaic in choosing a different blue color for a different purpose.

Stratoscope 5y ago

> Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have...overlapping windows. Actually Windows 1.0 did have overlapping windows. They just weren't the default style for application windows. But there were popup windows that overlapped other windows on the screen. These were typically used for dialog and message boxes, for example the End Session message box midway through that filfre.net article. There was nothing stopping anyone from using a popup-style window for their application, and adding a titlebar so you could move it around on the screen. It just wasn't the custom, and people would think your app was weird if it did that. And on a typical system of the day (no GPU!), dragging your window around on the screen would perform rather poorly.

billyhoffman 5y ago
Great catch! I had read that Digital Antiquarian piece a few months back and had remembered about the "sub windows" that an app could have. But I had thought they were scoped to just be on top of the window for the app that spawned it, and couldn't leave that "tile." However, you are totally right. This image right here clearly shows it overlapping another application's tiled window. https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-of-strike-outs/win8/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-3-a-pair-o... This is the best kind of correct: technically correct!

rufus_foreman 5y ago

>> WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987 WorldWideWeb was created by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.

cxr 5y ago
This is a reference to a bizarre anachronism in David Graeber's writing. The conflict over this passage once carried over to the comments here on HN while Graeber was still alive, and he and a longtime foe quarreled about it to a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion.

slightwinder 5y ago

The part about project xanadu is also shady. They list it as 1964, but first paper was published 1965, while their idea of hypertext was born 1960, with the word choosen 1963. Not sure where the 1964 comes from. Not to mention that this wasn't even an actual implementation. It's disputable whether xanadu really should be the first one to mention here. The ideas of referencing documents is older and has previous implementations in analog world. It they wanna go just about hypertext, they should at least started with memex.