Xerox Star User Interface (1982) 2 of 2

I share that passion too! Most people grossly underestimate how difficult it is to implement something as seemingly simple as a text field or menu, when there are so many hidden issues and techniques that make them easy to use because you don't notice all the support you're getting. Well implemented user interfaces have polish that makes their inherent complexity invisible, but polish is actually millions of tiny little scratches, not just a clean simple perfectly flat surface. Accessibility and internationalization are two crucial dimensions that most people forget about (especially non-sensory/motor-impaired Americans), which each add huge amounts of unavoidable complexity to text fields and the rest of the widget set. Then there's text selection, character/word/paragraph level selection, drag-n-drop, pending delete, scrolling, scrollbar hiding, auto scroll, focus management, keyboard navigation and shortcuts, copy and paste, alternative input methods, type-ahead, etc, all which need to perfectly dovetail together (like auto-scrolling working correctly during selection and drag-n-drop, auto-scrolling triggering on a reasonably scaled timer regardless of mouse position instead of mouse movements only inside the text field, so scrolling is deterministically controllable and happens at a reasonable speed, and doesn't freeze when you stop moving the mouse or move it too far, etc). There are so many half-assed custom text fields out there written by well intentioned people who j

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 link ▶ this video 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 updated the book for a FPGA based computer. link There were several generations of the Oberon OS, the last one before it stop being relevant, the Bluebottle OS coded in Active Oberon variant. link It had a strange mix of UI, using a mix of text and mouse input. Basically all applications were dynamic modules and the procedures/functions with a special signature could be used from the UI. So you could select text or objects from applications, and invoke such operations on the selection. The Oberon System 3 and Oberon V4 with their Gadgets framework were the best experience, before AOS was designed. Most relevant OS in Modula-3 was SPIN OS, link There were a few others, this is just a small sample.

Self link Xerox Star User Interface link ▶ this video 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

Mainly videos Self link Xerox Star User Interface link ▶ this video Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk link The Smalltalk-80 Programming System link The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer link Symbolics Hypertext Document link

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 link ▶ this video

"Abiword normally does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas" The Xerox Alto had this in 1982[1]. NINETEEN FREAKING EIGHTY TWO. How is it possible that any WYSIWYG word processor is allowed to ship without this? [1] ▶ this video