3 ms·

The game is quite impressive for 1962. I'd also expect the first game to be something like tic-tac-toe, should be easier than such a real-time game. The circul

The game is quite impressive for 1962. I'd also expect the first game to be something like tic-tac-toe, should be easier than such a real-time game. The circular screen also brings up the idea of having circular displays today. It seems at first pretty inefficient, like windows are rectangles, duh. But such constraints can produce creative solutions, a very different way how to layout the UI. It's fun to think about how it could look like. (we have circular screens in many watches, but that's a bit special case ...

masswerk 2y ago
For an actual GUI on a PDP-1 (the PDP-1 featured a light pen for input), see the very first DECUS proceedings [1], "A World Oceanographic Data Display System" (1962) by Ed Fredkin (who was one of the most ardent proponents of the PDP-1), page 32. (This issue also features a paper on Spacewar! by J.M. Graetz, "Spacewar. Real-Time Capabilities of the PDP-1".) [1] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/decus/confProceedings/DECUS_1962.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/decus/confProceedings/DECUS_19... The PDP-1 provided also the basis for the first commercial CAD system by Itek. [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130129213055/http://cadhistory.net/06%20First%20Commercial%20CAD%20System.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130129213055/http://cadhistory...
- Create 2y ago
  Hi! We are grateful for all your nice archeological work, may we please ask to make "Baa Baa Black Sheep" on the Ferranti available again based on the scans? Many thanks!
  - masswerk 2y ago
    That's not me. Sorry.
    - Create 2y ago
      :) From what I can recall, it was a java (applet) Ferranti simulator running a typed in copy of the song obtained from a library (Manchester?). It was part of a research/art installation project. I'm not so sure now, but .at, and masswerk seemed to be involved. I'll look into it, or if someone here recognizes it...
      - masswerk 2y ago
        Do you mean this one (Manchester Mark I emulator in Java by David Link)? https://web.archive.org/web/20110723062727/http://alpha60.de/research/muc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110723062727/http://alpha60.de... Related to the topic of music on the Mark I: "BBC finds oldest digital music recording", https://bit-tech.net/news/beeb-finds-oldest-digital-music-recording/1/ https://bit-tech.net/news/beeb-finds-oldest-digital-music-re... See also this paper for a bit more background: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53280-6_8 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53280-6_...
        Create 2y ago
        Thank you! Although it wasn't the loveletter I was thinking of, but you are right: it was probably this, because it also plays some music and it is covered in the paper. There was an instance on the web, so those who could not make it to the installation could also experience it. According to alpha60.de, there was a Group Exhibition "Love Letters", Gallery Gabriele Senn in Vienna from 12.05.2023 to 28.07.2023. I think it was this: https://web.archive.org/web/20110723063000/http://alpha60.de/research/muc/live/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110723063000/http://alpha60.de... but the jar never loads from the archive. This is what I am after!
        masswerk 2y ago
        The key connection here is that David Link's emulation running "Love Letters" was an exhibit at the dOCUMENTA exhibition in 2012 and the Mark I thus entered the art world. > David Link’s eponymous installation LoveLetters was first shown at dOCUMENTA(13), 2012. In it, the artist and computer archeologist Link romantically resurrects the earliest electronic, programmable and universal calculating machine worldwide: the Manchester University Computer or MUC. In 1953 and out of nowhere, it started to produce strange and touching love letters, addressed to anonymous people, or perhaps machines. The present version Love Letters – core is also based on the original source code by Christopher Strachey, a friend and colleague of Alan M. Turing, from 1951, and accompanied by two photographic prints of love letters on vintage CR tubes in the first on-screen font ever. (Gallery Gabriele Senn, https://galeriesenn.at/love-letters/ https://galeriesenn.at/love-letters/)
- flyinghamster 2y ago
  Also in that 1962 DECUS report, it appears that holy wars are older than me. In particular, there's a short debate between a proponent of MACRO vs. another who preferred DECAL for programming. These were two different assemblers that were offered for PDP-1 programmers. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp1/FRAP_DECAL_Intro.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp1/FRAP_DECAL_I...
VelesDude 2y ago
The closest modern example of round displays would be smart watches.
DonHopkins 2y ago
The earliest known implementation of radial pie menus was in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, on a PDP-7 with a round 340 vector display with a light pen, connected over the network to a Titan, one of the first network distributed user interface systems. Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI Films from the University of Cambridge Library Archives: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html It wasn't until I implemented pie menus in PostScript for the NeWS window system in 1988 that they were actually drawn in round windows. https://donhopkins.medium.com/how-to-choose-with-pie-menus-march-1988-2519c095ba59 https://donhopkins.medium.com/how-to-choose-with-pie-menus-m... More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39217923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39217923 DonHopkins 87 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu Thanks for the shout out and links! That timeline you linked to goes along with this article I wrote a few years ago: Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018. https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#8546 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#8546 The earliest known implementation of pie menus was in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector display with a light pen. Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471. https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20approach%20to%20man-machine%20communication.pdf https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20... Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI Films from the University of Cambridge Library Archives: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html In 1986 Mike Gallaher and I together came up with the same idea, and I implemented a prototype proof-of-concept for the X10 window system I called "theta menus": https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/theta-menus/ https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/theta-menus/ Mitch Bradley suggested the name "pie menu", and I implemented them in the X10 "uwm" window manager, which I integrated into Mitch's Sun Forth system so it was possible to script the window manager in Forth: https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/ https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/ https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/fuwm-main.f https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/fuwm-main.f X10 Pie Menu Window Manager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog You could define both pie menus and linear menus in a special menu definition syntax in your .uwmrc file, and configure them to run various window management, application launching, and shell scripting commands. But there was no pie menu editor, just a text file defining the menus. We performed an experiment to compare the speed and error rate of pie menus and linear menus, which I programmed in Forth to randomize and present the menus and measure the error rates and timing statistics. Pie Menu Experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0zEUi6p2ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0zEUi6p2ws Implementing a Forth scriptable pie menu window manager for X10 led the way to implementing pie menus in PostScript for various versions of the NeWS window system. It was easy for me to make the transition from Forth to PostScript, which is much more like Lisp than like Forth, and NeWS had an object oriented programming system like Smalltalk which is great for implementing user interface toolkits. Just the pie menus from All The Widgets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE Ben Shneiderman demo: Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg [...]

masswerk 2y ago

For an actual GUI on a PDP-1 (the PDP-1 featured a light pen for input), see the very first DECUS proceedings [1], "A World Oceanographic Data Display System" (1962) by Ed Fredkin (who was one of the most ardent proponents of the PDP-1), page 32. (This issue also features a paper on Spacewar! by J.M. Graetz, "Spacewar. Real-Time Capabilities of the PDP-1".) [1] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/decus/confProceedings/DECUS_1962.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/decus/confProceedings/DECUS_19... The PDP-1 provided also the basis for the first commercial CAD system by Itek. [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130129213055/http://cadhistory.net/06%20First%20Commercial%20CAD%20System.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130129213055/http://cadhistory...

Create 2y ago
Hi! We are grateful for all your nice archeological work, may we please ask to make "Baa Baa Black Sheep" on the Ferranti available again based on the scans? Many thanks!
- masswerk 2y ago
  That's not me. Sorry.
  - Create 2y ago
    :) From what I can recall, it was a java (applet) Ferranti simulator running a typed in copy of the song obtained from a library (Manchester?). It was part of a research/art installation project. I'm not so sure now, but .at, and masswerk seemed to be involved. I'll look into it, or if someone here recognizes it...
    - masswerk 2y ago
      Do you mean this one (Manchester Mark I emulator in Java by David Link)? https://web.archive.org/web/20110723062727/http://alpha60.de/research/muc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110723062727/http://alpha60.de... Related to the topic of music on the Mark I: "BBC finds oldest digital music recording", https://bit-tech.net/news/beeb-finds-oldest-digital-music-recording/1/ https://bit-tech.net/news/beeb-finds-oldest-digital-music-re... See also this paper for a bit more background: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53280-6_8 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53280-6_...
      - Create 2y ago
        Thank you! Although it wasn't the loveletter I was thinking of, but you are right: it was probably this, because it also plays some music and it is covered in the paper. There was an instance on the web, so those who could not make it to the installation could also experience it. According to alpha60.de, there was a Group Exhibition "Love Letters", Gallery Gabriele Senn in Vienna from 12.05.2023 to 28.07.2023. I think it was this: https://web.archive.org/web/20110723063000/http://alpha60.de/research/muc/live/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110723063000/http://alpha60.de... but the jar never loads from the archive. This is what I am after!
        masswerk 2y ago
        The key connection here is that David Link's emulation running "Love Letters" was an exhibit at the dOCUMENTA exhibition in 2012 and the Mark I thus entered the art world. > David Link’s eponymous installation LoveLetters was first shown at dOCUMENTA(13), 2012. In it, the artist and computer archeologist Link romantically resurrects the earliest electronic, programmable and universal calculating machine worldwide: the Manchester University Computer or MUC. In 1953 and out of nowhere, it started to produce strange and touching love letters, addressed to anonymous people, or perhaps machines. The present version Love Letters – core is also based on the original source code by Christopher Strachey, a friend and colleague of Alan M. Turing, from 1951, and accompanied by two photographic prints of love letters on vintage CR tubes in the first on-screen font ever. (Gallery Gabriele Senn, https://galeriesenn.at/love-letters/ https://galeriesenn.at/love-letters/)
flyinghamster 2y ago
Also in that 1962 DECUS report, it appears that holy wars are older than me. In particular, there's a short debate between a proponent of MACRO vs. another who preferred DECAL for programming. These were two different assemblers that were offered for PDP-1 programmers. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp1/FRAP_DECAL_Intro.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp1/FRAP_DECAL_I...

VelesDude 2y ago

The closest modern example of round displays would be smart watches.

DonHopkins 2y ago

The earliest known implementation of radial pie menus was in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, on a PDP-7 with a round 340 vector display with a light pen, connected over the network to a Titan, one of the first network distributed user interface systems. Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI Films from the University of Cambridge Library Archives: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html It wasn't until I implemented pie menus in PostScript for the NeWS window system in 1988 that they were actually drawn in round windows. https://donhopkins.medium.com/how-to-choose-with-pie-menus-march-1988-2519c095ba59 https://donhopkins.medium.com/how-to-choose-with-pie-menus-m... More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39217923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39217923 DonHopkins 87 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu Thanks for the shout out and links! That timeline you linked to goes along with this article I wrote a few years ago: Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018. https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#8546 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#8546 The earliest known implementation of pie menus was in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector display with a light pen. Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471. https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20approach%20to%20man-machine%20communication.pdf https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20... Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI Films from the University of Cambridge Library Archives: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html In 1986 Mike Gallaher and I together came up with the same idea, and I implemented a prototype proof-of-concept for the X10 window system I called "theta menus": https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/theta-menus/ https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/theta-menus/ Mitch Bradley suggested the name "pie menu", and I implemented them in the X10 "uwm" window manager, which I integrated into Mitch's Sun Forth system so it was possible to script the window manager in Forth: https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/ https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/ https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/fuwm-main.f https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/fuwm-main.f X10 Pie Menu Window Manager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog You could define both pie menus and linear menus in a special menu definition syntax in your .uwmrc file, and configure them to run various window management, application launching, and shell scripting commands. But there was no pie menu editor, just a text file defining the menus. We performed an experiment to compare the speed and error rate of pie menus and linear menus, which I programmed in Forth to randomize and present the menus and measure the error rates and timing statistics. Pie Menu Experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0zEUi6p2ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0zEUi6p2ws Implementing a Forth scriptable pie menu window manager for X10 led the way to implementing pie menus in PostScript for various versions of the NeWS window system. It was easy for me to make the transition from Forth to PostScript, which is much more like Lisp than like Forth, and NeWS had an object oriented programming system like Smalltalk which is great for implementing user interface toolkits. Just the pie menus from All The Widgets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE Ben Shneiderman demo: Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg [...]