4 ms·
Ah, early GUIs. For comparison, take a look at Xerox' Cedar and Smalltalk, or Wirth's Lillith and Oberon, all from pretty much the same era. The Lilith system
by mhd 14y ago
Ah, early GUIs. For comparison, take a look at Xerox' Cedar and Smalltalk, or Wirth's Lillith and Oberon, all from pretty much the same era.
The Lilith systems are often overlooked. They predate the Blit, are programmed in Modula-2, translated to bytecode. Oberon is a bit more well-known, but still not as much as both the language and the OS deserve.
Lilith demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc
Some screenshots & pics: http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-of-lilith http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-of-lilith
Cedar demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk
(Smalltalk and Oberon are a bit easier to find and more well-known anyway)
- sp332 14y agoAh, early GUIs. Sadly, the 5620 launched in 1984, the same year as the first Macintosh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.p...
- mhd 14y agoNot really competitors. The VT220 terminal (the target for every "terminal emulator") came out in '83.
- fosap 14y agoIf you want more modern early GUIs investigate Plan 9, also by Rob Pike. Rio is like Blit and ACME is like Oberon.
- mhd 14y agoWhile the pedigree does stretch back a bit, I wouldn't call Acme "early". The paper came out in '94…
- pmarin 14y agoAcme is based on the Oberon system (1985)
- mhd 14y agoWhich in turn took quite some influence from Cedar/Mesa at Xerox. But one might as well say that KDE 4.9 (2012) is based on MacOS (1984), that doesn't make it an "early GUI" in my eyes.
- fosap 14y agoWell, that the "modern" part. The interface itself is by Writh, no idea when h published a paper about it, that the "early" part.
- gchpaco 14y agoIt is creepy how much that looks like 8 1/2 and rio. Pike clearly thought he had a good thing.
- gadders 14y agoOh man, I remember Modula-2. It was what my engineering course taught us to code in. That was handy on my CV.
- wtracy 14y agoI got a smile out of the Cedar demo talking about documents as user interfaces. Arguably the concept of the web as a user interface pre-dates the web!
- mhd 14y agoThe point being that this is an editable document serving as a user interface. Which, if I remember correctly, some people once envisioned for the web (cf. Amaya[1]), but never really took hold. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_%28web_editor%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_%28web_editor%29