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!
breadwinner · 3h 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.
bitwize · 1h ago
Thankfully, NeWS has a successor: the browser and Electron. Before you giggle, recognize that in 1990 16 MiB was a HUGE amount of memory, and apps that needed that much to run felt even slower and more bloated than today's Electron apps. A workstation with that much memory would have cost $10,000 or so in 1980s dollars.
Can't wait for DonHopkins to magically appear and infodump about NeWS and his involvement therewith, copypasta-ing entire email threads and even a PostScript pie menu implementation.
anthk · 1h ago
Yes... and no.
By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to XT such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a lot. Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.
If any, by 2025 Gnome would kill any GJS usage to parts of Mutter would be reimplemented in either Vala or Rust getting a big performance boost. BcacheFS would be a stable thing making EXT4 something to be legacied in years. Even the open release of JFS was incredible; a journaling FS being much better for old CPU's than EXT3...
Today we are seeing the opposite trend.
bitwize · 1h ago
> By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to XT such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a lot. Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.
For X11, sure (but even then there were systems that ran circles around X11 in half a meg of RAM).
But not for NeWS.
anthk · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
buescher · 3h 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.
skissane · 1h 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)
cmrdporcupine · 1h 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.
anthk · 1h 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?...
sprash · 1h 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.
anthk · 1h 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.
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
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.
Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so mid-90's, but close.
anthk · 1h 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:
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!
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.
Can't wait for DonHopkins to magically appear and infodump about NeWS and his involvement therewith, copypasta-ing entire email threads and even a PostScript pie menu implementation.
By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to XT such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a lot. Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.
If any, by 2025 Gnome would kill any GJS usage to parts of Mutter would be reimplemented in either Vala or Rust getting a big performance boost. BcacheFS would be a stable thing making EXT4 something to be legacied in years. Even the open release of JFS was incredible; a journaling FS being much better for old CPU's than EXT3...
Today we are seeing the opposite trend.
For X11, sure (but even then there were systems that ran circles around X11 in half a meg of RAM).
But not for NeWS.
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.
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.
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)
It's an interesting model, a path not taken.
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.
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
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
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
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:
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.
https://galeriawm.hol.es
In Spanish, but the screenshots speak for themselves.