4 ms·

Ah from the time of great widget wars, when Motif and OPEN LOOK were battling for GUI supremacy. I was vehemently team OL (via Sun's OpenWindows flavor) and ab

Ah from the time of great widget wars, when Motif and OPEN LOOK were battling for GUI supremacy. I was vehemently team OL (via Sun's OpenWindows flavor) and absolutely loathed how bulky the borders felt on Motif windows.

DonHopkins 5y ago
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47#4fa8 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly.
- vickm 5y ago
  I couldn't stop laughing/crying reading this trip into high school and college. As a kid I thought I was the dense fool who couldn't make sense of X. Nope, it just sucked. Thanks for keeping this history alive :) As a matter of fact, the mess with widgets and X APIs was the turning point for me where I started to understand why these suits spent so much damn $$$ on Win32
sedatk 5y ago
On the contrary, I'd found Motif's 3D look so elegant and cool that I'd even incorporated it in my DOS-based GUI library. This is a BlueWave/QWK reader I'd written with it: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine https://github.com/ssg/wolverine
- int_19h 5y ago
  Your widgets look like they have a 1px 3D border? The Motif that I remember was much bulkier, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg
  - sedatk 5y ago
    Probably. I couldn’t afford long draw times (it ran on 386SX-25Mhz), so I usually opted for 1px for everything. The resolution was lower too (640x480) leaving less space for for decoration.
  - mkl 5y ago
    They both look very close in terms of pixel widths, though the Motif screenshot is much higher resolution so there they actually look thinner to me. The window borders are 5px, vs. Motif's 6px (in your screenshot). The Motif button borders are actually thinner (2px vs. 3px). The Motif frames around lists are thicker (2px vs. 1px).

DonHopkins 5y ago

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47#4fa8 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly.

vickm 5y ago
I couldn't stop laughing/crying reading this trip into high school and college. As a kid I thought I was the dense fool who couldn't make sense of X. Nope, it just sucked. Thanks for keeping this history alive :) As a matter of fact, the mess with widgets and X APIs was the turning point for me where I started to understand why these suits spent so much damn $$$ on Win32

sedatk 5y ago

On the contrary, I'd found Motif's 3D look so elegant and cool that I'd even incorporated it in my DOS-based GUI library. This is a BlueWave/QWK reader I'd written with it: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine https://github.com/ssg/wolverine

int_19h 5y ago
Your widgets look like they have a 1px 3D border? The Motif that I remember was much bulkier, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg
- sedatk 5y ago
  Probably. I couldn’t afford long draw times (it ran on 386SX-25Mhz), so I usually opted for 1px for everything. The resolution was lower too (640x480) leaving less space for for decoration.
- mkl 5y ago
  They both look very close in terms of pixel widths, though the Motif screenshot is much higher resolution so there they actually look thinner to me. The window borders are 5px, vs. Motif's 6px (in your screenshot). The Motif button borders are actually thinner (2px vs. 3px). The Motif frames around lists are thicker (2px vs. 1px).