4 ms·

I was dumbfounded to find NeXTSTEP missing: it was among the very most influential GUIs in history. Much of 95's UI (and OS/2's UI) were stolen directly from i

I was dumbfounded to find NeXTSTEP missing: it was among the very most influential GUIs in history. Much of 95's UI (and OS/2's UI) were stolen directly from it, and badly, right down to icons. This page also seems to focus not on UIs, not on GUIs, but just on GUIs for personal computers. No discussion of the tablet->PDA->phone->small device UI evolution at all, even though that UI route has now had profound impact even on laptops. Where's the Newton?

eesmith 4y ago
Did you notice how nearly all the text was copy/pasted from Wikipedia? Though the KDE one was copy/pasted from the initial KDE email.
- AlbertoGP 4y ago
  You seem to be right: I just picked one, “Xerox Star”, and it is copied from Wikipedia with a couple of changes: “was” → “is”, “mouse” → “mouse (two-button)” I think that putting attributions on each entry would be too distracting, I’d rather keep the clean style that focuses on the content, but there should be some attribution in the page footer. Edit: Wow, also the pictures are lifted without attribution as noted in this other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093743
ArtWomb 4y ago
MIT Project Athena was also hugely influential: X Windows wasn't the only thing to spin out, but MATLAB and other pre-cursors of today's Jupyter style notebooks. The VAX super-mini grid could be used at night as a renderfarm ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  To be honest, I think Athena and X have had very little influence. X's GUI design (and the Athena widget set) was entirely derivative of the Lisa/Mac interface. The notion of a client-server GUI system -- a historic extension of Unix terminals and servers -- has largely failed and is now disuse on modern Unix systems. The idea of a customizable window server has not spread beyond X to any other major system to my knowledge. Its font subsystem, graphics subsystem, and event management was and remains astonishingly primitive. It's hard to think of anything X innovated that now appears in a modern GUI. Despite what the random Wikipedia contributor implied, neither MATLAB nor Maple have any historical relationship with X Windows or Project Athena. It is a huge stretch to say that Athena invented the concept of per-course educational and research software given that Apple had been doing that nearly a decade before, and indeed had built its entire business model on the concept. And the precursor to Jupyter notebooks was Mathematica, full stop. Mathematica invented the very concept of the interactive notebook, and it did so on NeXTSTEP.

eesmith 4y ago

Did you notice how nearly all the text was copy/pasted from Wikipedia? Though the KDE one was copy/pasted from the initial KDE email.

AlbertoGP 4y ago
You seem to be right: I just picked one, “Xerox Star”, and it is copied from Wikipedia with a couple of changes: “was” → “is”, “mouse” → “mouse (two-button)” I think that putting attributions on each entry would be too distracting, I’d rather keep the clean style that focuses on the content, but there should be some attribution in the page footer. Edit: Wow, also the pictures are lifted without attribution as noted in this other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093743

ArtWomb 4y ago

MIT Project Athena was also hugely influential: X Windows wasn't the only thing to spin out, but MATLAB and other pre-cursors of today's Jupyter style notebooks. The VAX super-mini grid could be used at night as a renderfarm ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena

SeanLuke 4y ago
To be honest, I think Athena and X have had very little influence. X's GUI design (and the Athena widget set) was entirely derivative of the Lisa/Mac interface. The notion of a client-server GUI system -- a historic extension of Unix terminals and servers -- has largely failed and is now disuse on modern Unix systems. The idea of a customizable window server has not spread beyond X to any other major system to my knowledge. Its font subsystem, graphics subsystem, and event management was and remains astonishingly primitive. It's hard to think of anything X innovated that now appears in a modern GUI. Despite what the random Wikipedia contributor implied, neither MATLAB nor Maple have any historical relationship with X Windows or Project Athena. It is a huge stretch to say that Athena invented the concept of per-course educational and research software given that Apple had been doing that nearly a decade before, and indeed had built its entire business model on the concept. And the precursor to Jupyter notebooks was Mathematica, full stop. Mathematica invented the very concept of the interactive notebook, and it did so on NeXTSTEP.