Xerox Star User Interface (1982) 1 of 2
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as a look at an early GUI that did a lot with little learning curve, often to contrast it with modern software.
What it is
A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2011 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends thought_alarm · 2011-04 · on “Pictures of the first GUIs from Xerox”
There are a few demos of the Xerox Star floating around on YouTube. Seeing it in action gives you a much more complete picture of the system. [this video] The "look" was obviously hugely influential, the "feel" not so much. It is quite an odd beast, as the mouse is actually only used for selecting objects. The Lisa GUI prototypes are also and interesting bit of GUI trivia. It's easy to see the Star's influence on the final shipping version of the Lisa GUI compared to its prototypes. [LINK]
Cites pjmlp · 2013-07 · on “Tangle: a JavaScript library for reactive documents”
Except the original Lisp and Smalltalk environments are much more than a simple REPL. Sometimes I wish people would learn about computing history. Presentation from Kalman Reti about Lisp Machines, check the interactivity starting at 00:44:00 and how to introduce mouse sensitive images at 01:00:00 [LINK] Xerox presentations about Smalltalk-80 [LINK] [this video] [LINK]
Cites pjmlp · 2014-04 · on “Shadow DOM”
Mainly videos Self [LINK] Xerox Star User Interface [this video] [LINK] Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk [LINK] The Smalltalk-80 Programming System [LINK] The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer [LINK] Symbolics Hypertext Document [LINK]
Cites pjmlp · 2014-06 · on “Web Starter Kit”
Self [LINK] Xerox Star User Interface [this video] [LINK] Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk [LINK] The Smalltalk-80 Programming System [LINK] The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer [LINK] Symbolics Hypertext Document [LINK] Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC [LINK] The Mesa/Cedar programming environment [LINK] Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, [LINK] Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]
Cites pjmlp · 2017-02 · on “Grappling with Go”
Faire enough, so prepare for an history lesson. :) Mesa/Cedar was created at Xerox PARC, as an extension of the Xerox Star 8010 system, which was programmed in Mesa, the language that inspired Niklaus Wirth to create Modula-2. [LINK] [this video] [LINK] Mesa evolved to Mesa/Cedar, which allowed for automatic memory management via reference counting and a tracing collector for the cycles. [LINK] The environment had a REPL and debugger inspired by the Smalltalk and Lisp systems at Xerox. Think of Swift Playgrounds, kind of. This system inspired Niklaus Wirth to create Oberon, which you can read about in his book, about how the OS was built. [LINK] In 2013, Niklaus Wirth revised the language and upd
Cites gizmo · 2017-03 · on “How much your computer can do in a second”
Way too much to cover in depth. In short, it's all terrible. We're mostly using tools from the 70s, and we're still to this day plagued by use-after-free and out-of-bounds errors, nullpointer exceptions, awful debuggers, race conditions, slow compilation times, bad primitives for multithreaded work, just to name a few. We've known for decades that we can do better and ways to do better have been studied in depth by academia. That's just the basics. Then there is futuristic things: Why can't we move running processes from one physical machine to another? Where are the debuggers that allow you to go back and forward in time? Why can't we visualize the data structures in our program and trivial
Cites romaniv · 2017-11 · on “Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983”
The thing that horrifies me about all of this is that instead of criticizing or fixing issues most people adapt what they do and even how they think to match all the deficiencies in software. Often, users simply can't imagine systems that work fundamentally differently and better. Often, when deficiencies are pointed out people start defending the mess and pointing out all the clever (half-assed, really) workaround and hacks they came up with. They are proud of all the time they spent (wasted) learning about obscure and counter-intuitive software functionality. They are proud that barely-working plugin/extensions/add-on they found and set up. All of that to do thing that should be trivial to
Cites romaniv · 2018-02 · on “Designing Windows 95’s User Interface”
> At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. After seeing some old demos of Xerox Star, I'd question that. [this video]