4 ms·

Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

27 points by hualapais 1y ago

anthk 1y ago
I knew that from some Spaniard who tried tons of WM's as a hobbyist, but he is competent enough to do some trivial patches to get them working in modern systems: https://galeriawm.hol.es https://galeriawm.hol.es In Spanish, but the screenshots speak for themselves.
- hulitu 1y ago
  Thanks. The url shall be with http, though.
anthk 1y ago
BTW, for fun, with XGopher, Gopher or Mosaic, head to gopher://hngopher.com Also, if you want a 'modern' Motif desktop mimicking the mid-90's, install emwm, xfile, classic-colors, xpdf (the old Motif) one, XImaginag and Nedit for XFT. https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html For a 'browser' you can use BFG, it runs gopher/gemini and gopher://magical.fish, gemini://gemi.dev and gopher://hnhgopher.com will look fine: https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG For IRC and Usenet, just use any terminal IRC client against libera.chat (it will look the exact same under XTerm) and... SLRN against the servers from https://eternal-september.org https://eternal-september.org And, as for Emacs, just install/build Lucid Emacs, get a nice Unicode font such as Go for sans as monospaced variants, it will look 100% close to Lucida fonts. At ~/.Xdefaults: emacs.pane.menubar.font: Go-9 emacs.font: Go-9 emacs.fontSet: Go-9 At ~/.emacs: (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Terminus" :height 100) ;; Proportionately spaced typeface (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "Go" :height 1.0) ;; Monospaced typeface (set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Terminus" :height 1.0) Terminus is not Artwiz, but it's good enough. Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so mid-90's, but close.
sprash 1y ago
> I think MGR has the greatest potential for a comeback because of its unique architecture I think so too. But this time with modern drawing primitives. Instead of lines an circles we need shaders and textures. In the end, even the most modern UI is nothing more than a terminal: Low bandwidth input from keyboard and mouse events and low bandwidth output (like draw checkbox at x,y). The rest is done by some drawing or blit routine which can be entirely managed on the GPU.
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Fascinating seeing what you had to know to use these early desktops. All these desktop environments start out blank. By contrast modern desktop environments help you understand what you can do by showing always-present visual guides, cues to what’s running now, & launchers. Windows 95’s Start Menu is the most iconic tipping point for the trend of making it easy to see what you can do with your computer. Current LLMs show a blinking cursor. Yes they can call tools, run code, and generate images in styles you’ll only know to ask for it you’re an art expert. But right now you have to know those capabilities exist. Even experts forget to use them at times. And novices get frustrated that an LLM can’t sort a list of names - even though all they have to do is ask it to write code for itself and the task will be easy. What will the AI “Start Menu” be!
sillywalk 1y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600 142 points by zdw on Oct 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments
breadwinner 1y ago
> In 1986 the successor to SunView was developed, the Network extensible Window System, or NeWS. SunView with NeWS was a powerful 2D graphics engine. It ran Adobe Display PostScript. The Sun workstations ran BSD unix, had good networking, protected memory, virtual memory and so on. And it did all that with 16 MB of memory. That's not a typo... 16 megabytes. Today our computers have 1000 times more RAM, but do our computers work better? Hardly. The NCD terminals from 1990 worked just as well as Chromebooks today. What have we accomplished in the last 35 years? Computers back then weren't powerful enough to play movies. Other than that I can't think of much I would miss if I had to go back to the old NCDs.
- anthk 1y ago
  The Chapter on compiling Emacs from the Unix Haters' Handbook says otherwise... and I am an OpenBSD user. Somehow, in the 90's, the reverse with libre software happened: Rxvt, xvt, fvwm... were far lighter and featureful than plain TWM, XTerm's and whatnot.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    Yeah the thing is, while these things were "lightweight" in comparison to today, they were not lightweight relative to the machines of the time. I had an 8MB 486 running early Linux versions and it was always a struggle. You could, with some swapping, run emacs, mosaic, X, etc. all at once, but it was slow. As now, same back then .. software developers tended to max out the capabilities of their machines. Which we were often on the whole beefier than what the general community had. If you actually go back and use software from the 90s on 90s machines, it's amazing how slow the experience can be. Input latencies are often better, but .. throughput awful. Start up times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading... which we just accepted along with the sound of a grinding hard drive or floppy disk.
    - anthk 1y ago
      Running X with 8MB of RAM? Emacs perfectly ran on TTY's, and for web browser Lynx worked. Images? You would get a SVGAlib viewer. With 16MB of RAM, and FVWM and RXvt (xvt before) ran circles around a Sparc with CDE and DTTerm/Xterm.
buescher 1y ago
I have a vague recollection of setting up mgr on Linux back in the nineties and giving it a spin. Maybe it was bundled with Slackware? That was the era that Slackware came with the Andrew user interface system and apps as well as xview.
- anthk 1y ago
  I never got Andrew's software working. If anyone ported them to modern systems (and made them XFT aware) they could be more known. If the current Nedit with OpenMotif compoled against XFT supports Unicode really well, why not?...
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  It was around, yeah. It was also ported to the Atari ST and I knew people who ran it on there before I ever saw it on Unix. It's an interesting model, a path not taken.
- skissane 1y ago
  I remember installing MGR (or at least trying to), but I couldn’t really work it out. I was only a teenager, probably my early teens. I remember exactly where I got it from - InfoMagic’s 1994 Linux Annual 4 volume CD-ROM set. Although that did contain Slackware, I’m not sure if it actually was a Slackware package. The CD-ROM set included dumps of Sunsite and TSX-11, and I think maybe it was from one of those. This CD-ROM set went through a few different editions, and Internet Archive has some of them, but not sure if it has the exact one I had - which I still have somewhere, I should probably try imaging it (assuming it is still readable decades later)

27 points by hualapais 1y ago

I knew that from some Spaniard who tried tons of WM's as a hobbyist, but he is competent enough to do some trivial patches to get them working in modern systems: https://galeriawm.hol.es https://galeriawm.hol.es In Spanish, but the screenshots speak for themselves.

hulitu 1y ago
Thanks. The url shall be with http, though.

anthk 1y ago

BTW, for fun, with XGopher, Gopher or Mosaic, head to gopher://hngopher.com Also, if you want a 'modern' Motif desktop mimicking the mid-90's, install emwm, xfile, classic-colors, xpdf (the old Motif) one, XImaginag and Nedit for XFT. https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html For a 'browser' you can use BFG, it runs gopher/gemini and gopher://magical.fish, gemini://gemi.dev and gopher://hnhgopher.com will look fine: https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG For IRC and Usenet, just use any terminal IRC client against libera.chat (it will look the exact same under XTerm) and... SLRN against the servers from https://eternal-september.org https://eternal-september.org And, as for Emacs, just install/build Lucid Emacs, get a nice Unicode font such as Go for sans as monospaced variants, it will look 100% close to Lucida fonts. At ~/.Xdefaults: emacs.pane.menubar.font: Go-9 emacs.font: Go-9 emacs.fontSet: Go-9 At ~/.emacs: (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Terminus" :height 100) ;; Proportionately spaced typeface (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "Go" :height 1.0) ;; Monospaced typeface (set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Terminus" :height 1.0) Terminus is not Artwiz, but it's good enough. Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so mid-90's, but close.

sprash 1y ago

> I think MGR has the greatest potential for a comeback because of its unique architecture I think so too. But this time with modern drawing primitives. Instead of lines an circles we need shaders and textures. In the end, even the most modern UI is nothing more than a terminal: Low bandwidth input from keyboard and mouse events and low bandwidth output (like draw checkbox at x,y). The rest is done by some drawing or blit routine which can be entirely managed on the GPU.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Fascinating seeing what you had to know to use these early desktops. All these desktop environments start out blank. By contrast modern desktop environments help you understand what you can do by showing always-present visual guides, cues to what’s running now, & launchers. Windows 95’s Start Menu is the most iconic tipping point for the trend of making it easy to see what you can do with your computer. Current LLMs show a blinking cursor. Yes they can call tools, run code, and generate images in styles you’ll only know to ask for it you’re an art expert. But right now you have to know those capabilities exist. Even experts forget to use them at times. And novices get frustrated that an LLM can’t sort a list of names - even though all they have to do is ask it to write code for itself and the task will be easy. What will the AI “Start Menu” be!

sillywalk 1y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600 142 points by zdw on Oct 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments

breadwinner 1y ago

> In 1986 the successor to SunView was developed, the Network extensible Window System, or NeWS. SunView with NeWS was a powerful 2D graphics engine. It ran Adobe Display PostScript. The Sun workstations ran BSD unix, had good networking, protected memory, virtual memory and so on. And it did all that with 16 MB of memory. That's not a typo... 16 megabytes. Today our computers have 1000 times more RAM, but do our computers work better? Hardly. The NCD terminals from 1990 worked just as well as Chromebooks today. What have we accomplished in the last 35 years? Computers back then weren't powerful enough to play movies. Other than that I can't think of much I would miss if I had to go back to the old NCDs.

anthk 1y ago
The Chapter on compiling Emacs from the Unix Haters' Handbook says otherwise... and I am an OpenBSD user. Somehow, in the 90's, the reverse with libre software happened: Rxvt, xvt, fvwm... were far lighter and featureful than plain TWM, XTerm's and whatnot.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  Yeah the thing is, while these things were "lightweight" in comparison to today, they were not lightweight relative to the machines of the time. I had an 8MB 486 running early Linux versions and it was always a struggle. You could, with some swapping, run emacs, mosaic, X, etc. all at once, but it was slow. As now, same back then .. software developers tended to max out the capabilities of their machines. Which we were often on the whole beefier than what the general community had. If you actually go back and use software from the 90s on 90s machines, it's amazing how slow the experience can be. Input latencies are often better, but .. throughput awful. Start up times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading... which we just accepted along with the sound of a grinding hard drive or floppy disk.
  - anthk 1y ago
    Running X with 8MB of RAM? Emacs perfectly ran on TTY's, and for web browser Lynx worked. Images? You would get a SVGAlib viewer. With 16MB of RAM, and FVWM and RXvt (xvt before) ran circles around a Sparc with CDE and DTTerm/Xterm.

buescher 1y ago

I have a vague recollection of setting up mgr on Linux back in the nineties and giving it a spin. Maybe it was bundled with Slackware? That was the era that Slackware came with the Andrew user interface system and apps as well as xview.

anthk 1y ago
I never got Andrew's software working. If anyone ported them to modern systems (and made them XFT aware) they could be more known. If the current Nedit with OpenMotif compoled against XFT supports Unicode really well, why not?...
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
It was around, yeah. It was also ported to the Atari ST and I knew people who ran it on there before I ever saw it on Unix. It's an interesting model, a path not taken.
skissane 1y ago
I remember installing MGR (or at least trying to), but I couldn’t really work it out. I was only a teenager, probably my early teens. I remember exactly where I got it from - InfoMagic’s 1994 Linux Annual 4 volume CD-ROM set. Although that did contain Slackware, I’m not sure if it actually was a Slackware package. The CD-ROM set included dumps of Sunsite and TSX-11, and I think maybe it was from one of those. This CD-ROM set went through a few different editions, and Internet Archive has some of them, but not sure if it has the exact one I had - which I still have somewhere, I should probably try imaging it (assuming it is still readable decades later)