* [TUHS] X11 Conservancy Project
@ 2022-12-25 18:15 Michelangelo De Simone
2022-12-25 19:16 ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
` (2 more replies)
0 siblings, 3 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Michelangelo De Simone @ 2022-12-25 18:15 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: tuhs
From [1]:
The X11 Conservancy Project (X11CP) pulls together the disparate set of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and early 90s -- usually for Unix and Linux.
…snip…
As the Internet expanded and Linux distributions became established, certain FTP sites were largely used to host some of the more established programs, as well as those found in the LSM.
…snip…
But the early dawn of free software, especially around applications written for X11, using Motif and XT and other widget libraries has now mostly been consigned to obscurity.
With X11 itself now under threat of no longer being developed in favour of Wayland, these applications are going to be harder to run and be discovered.
Hence, the X11CP is designed to be a central place for hosting the sources of these applications, and to showcase their unique history and properties. In keeping this software active, it will help keep an important historical point alive.
[1] https://x11cp.org/
— Michelangelo
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: X11 Conservancy Project
2022-12-25 18:15 [TUHS] X11 Conservancy Project Michelangelo De Simone
@ 2022-12-25 19:16 ` segaloco via TUHS
2022-12-25 19:57 ` Michael Kjörling
2022-12-25 20:51 ` [TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project) G. Branden Robinson
2022-12-26 9:59 ` [TUHS] Re: X11 Conservancy Project Lars Brinkhoff
2 siblings, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread
From: segaloco via TUHS @ 2022-12-25 19:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Michelangelo De Simone; +Cc: tuhs
Does the project accept patches to old X11 applications to get them working again? I've recently been tinkering with xfm, would love to contribute my retooling to such an effort.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Sunday, December 25th, 2022 at 10:15 AM, Michelangelo De Simone <michel@ngelo.eu> wrote:
> From [1]:
>
> The X11 Conservancy Project (X11CP) pulls together the disparate set of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and early 90s -- usually for Unix and Linux.
>
> …snip…
>
> As the Internet expanded and Linux distributions became established, certain FTP sites were largely used to host some of the more established programs, as well as those found in the LSM.
>
> …snip…
>
> But the early dawn of free software, especially around applications written for X11, using Motif and XT and other widget libraries has now mostly been consigned to obscurity.
> With X11 itself now under threat of no longer being developed in favour of Wayland, these applications are going to be harder to run and be discovered.
>
> Hence, the X11CP is designed to be a central place for hosting the sources of these applications, and to showcase their unique history and properties. In keeping this software active, it will help keep an important historical point alive.
>
> [1] https://x11cp.org/
>
> — Michelangelo
>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: X11 Conservancy Project
2022-12-25 19:16 ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
@ 2022-12-25 19:57 ` Michael Kjörling
0 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Michael Kjörling @ 2022-12-25 19:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: tuhs
On 25 Dec 2022 19:16 +0000, from tuhs@tuhs.org (segaloco via TUHS):
> Does the project accept patches to old X11 applications to get them
> working again?
The "X11CP repository" link on the web site goes to
https://codeberg.org/x11cp/x11cp which has a README that, under
"Contributing", among other things lists "Source-code modification".
There is also a recent patch committed that explicitly says "add
compilation fixes" and "This makes gcc happier". See
<https://codeberg.org/x11cp/x11cp/commit/e7bbb03e40212f5ae76ec448e162758494f7daf3>.
By deduction, I would expect patches that allows old software to
compile and execute on modern systems, while remainining true to the
experience of running those applications in their original
environment, to qualify for inclusion.
There is also multiple points of contact listed, by way of which you
could almost certainly get an authoritative answer.
--
Michael Kjörling 🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
2022-12-25 18:15 [TUHS] X11 Conservancy Project Michelangelo De Simone
2022-12-25 19:16 ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
@ 2022-12-25 20:51 ` G. Branden Robinson
2022-12-25 21:03 ` [TUHS] " Brad Spencer
` (2 more replies)
2022-12-26 9:59 ` [TUHS] Re: X11 Conservancy Project Lars Brinkhoff
2 siblings, 3 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: G. Branden Robinson @ 2022-12-25 20:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: tuhs
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At 2022-12-25T10:15:19-0800, Michelangelo De Simone wrote:
> The X11 Conservancy Project (X11CP) pulls together the disparate set
> of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and
> early 90s -- usually for Unix and Linux.
It looks like this must have just gotten started. All that is present
is xtartan. Which I do at least remember. :)
Library support is going to be an issue for a lot of X11 legacy apps.
I remember that the XForms widget library used to be proprietary, and I
recall that it had been freed, but not that this had been done 20 years
ago now[1][2]...albeit still too late to have made itself the center of
the Linux desktop environment, as it could have been if only the
copyright holders had not clung so tightly to The Precious.
Motif and XView similarly got freed (the latter quite early in fact, as
I recall...but night had already fallen for the SunView UI).
But two tooklit variants I've heard of, I've never found out if they
ever made their sources freely available: OLIT and MoOLIT.
As I understand it, OLIT was XView, but written on top of the X Toolkit
Intrinsics library (Xt) as opposed to bypassing it and going straight to
libX11.
And MoOLIT was, apparently, some kind of shim--whether it supplemented
OLIT or replaced it, I am not sure--that, like XForms and Java's AWT,
allowed you to to write a "look-and-feel-neutral" application.
As I recall, such efforts often failed because they abstracted only the
intersection of available features rather than the union of them, so
except for very simple UIs, programs didn't look or behave
"idiomatically" anyway.
I'd be curious to hear people's recollections of these and especially to
learn of any pointers to source.
Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS, which
I never saw in the flesh.
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110718230734/http://xforms-toolkit.org/
Nowadays its web site does not even mention its proprietary past.
[2] Before that relicensing, I was part of a team at Progeny Linux
Systems that was contracted by HP to port xforms (and a lot of other
stuff) to IA-64. xforms was given to me because I was "the X guy"
on staff. I don't remember it being difficult--just the usual
long/int punning issues. I don't recollect now whether xforms had
already been ported to Alpha or SPARC V9; it seems to me that it
should have been by 2001, or would have been, had it been FLOSS.
Great merriment was had in those days dogging on IA-64, but the more
I learned about that ISA the more I liked it compared it to x86,
though that may be damning it with faint praise. But apparently
IA-64 made novel demands with respect to instruction sequencing that
caused compiler writers--or perhaps more accurately the people who
would have to pay compiler writers--squeal like pigs in hot oil.
Intel had a similar "fiasco" with the iAPX 432 fifteen years before;
that was the ISA for which, infamously, "Ada [was the] intended
primary language for application programming." Ada was also
reviled, ostenisbly because it was too damn hard to write a compiler
for it, but probably also because its keyword inventory more closely
resembled Pascal than C, which was already starting to eat the world
in the mid-1980s. Strangely enough, as I understand it, the
compiler innovations demanded by Ada and IA-64, respectively, came
to be standard and expected, and their benefits enjoyed unthinkingly
by x86 and C advocates. Thus do we reward innovation in this
industry.
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
2022-12-25 20:51 ` [TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project) G. Branden Robinson
@ 2022-12-25 21:03 ` Brad Spencer
2022-12-25 21:38 ` josh
2022-12-26 4:18 ` Warner Losh
2 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Brad Spencer @ 2022-12-25 21:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: G. Branden Robinson; +Cc: tuhs
"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:
[snip]
> And MoOLIT was, apparently, some kind of shim--whether it supplemented
> OLIT or replaced it, I am not sure--that, like XForms and Java's AWT,
> allowed you to to write a "look-and-feel-neutral" application.
[snip]
Motif on OLIT, if I remember that correctly. Sort of a Motif look and
feel but without the need to purchase a license for Motif which you had
to do at the time (that is, in order to even RUN a motif linked
application, you needed the shared libraries which you could pretty much
only get by purchasing a license.. there was probably other ways, and
it has been a LONG time ago). Our group at AT&T used it to keep from
having to have the customer buy anything additional for a release but
who also wanted "Motif". I don't honestly remember if you coded in OLIT
or Motif, but probably OLIT, but the end result was something that sort
of looked like Motif in the end.
--
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
2022-12-25 20:51 ` [TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project) G. Branden Robinson
2022-12-25 21:03 ` [TUHS] " Brad Spencer
@ 2022-12-25 21:38 ` josh
2022-12-25 21:47 ` Ron Natalie
2022-12-26 6:26 ` arnold
2022-12-26 4:18 ` Warner Losh
2 siblings, 2 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: josh @ 2022-12-25 21:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: G. Branden Robinson; +Cc: tuhs
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>
> Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS, which
> I never saw in the flesh.
>
Branden,
You may find this fellow’s archaeological dig on NeWS and PostScript
interesting: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/788053163857379328
He also attempted to make a NeWS clone:
http://dev.rsnous.com/dewdrop/executive/ (source available).
Josh
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
2022-12-25 21:38 ` josh
@ 2022-12-25 21:47 ` Ron Natalie
2022-12-26 6:26 ` arnold
1 sibling, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Ron Natalie @ 2022-12-25 21:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: tuhs
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Much as I was a fan of NeWS back in the day (and later used a NeWS-ish
complete with the Owen Densmore object oriented extensions) postscript
interpreter as the basis for our product,
I’m having some issues with that “history.” First off, you couldn’t
arbitrarily cat a PostScript file to the screen and expect it to work.
There were enough differences between Adobe and the NeWS version to
cause problems.
The idea of putting small programs (written in PostScript) to handle the
interaction was an interesting one. The problem is that writing stuff
in PostScript (even with the NeWS extensions) is so godawful that I have
my doubts about having implemented an entire X Server in one (having
written several X Servers subsequent to that).
Of course, Gosling came up with a more palatable development language
for the next attempt: Java.
------ Original Message ------
From "josh" <joshnatis0@gmail.com>
To "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Cc "tuhs@tuhs.org" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Date 12/25/2022 4:38:32 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
>>Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS,
>>which
>>I never saw in the flesh.
>
>Branden,
>
>You may find this fellow’s archaeological dig on NeWS and PostScript
>interesting: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/788053163857379328
>
>He also attempted to make a NeWS clone:
>http://dev.rsnous.com/dewdrop/executive/ (source available).
>
>Josh
>
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
2022-12-25 20:51 ` [TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project) G. Branden Robinson
2022-12-25 21:03 ` [TUHS] " Brad Spencer
2022-12-25 21:38 ` josh
@ 2022-12-26 4:18 ` Warner Losh
2 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-12-26 4:18 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: G. Branden Robinson; +Cc: tuhs
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On Sun, Dec 25, 2022 at 1:52 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> At 2022-12-25T10:15:19-0800, Michelangelo De Simone wrote:
> > The X11 Conservancy Project (X11CP) pulls together the disparate set
> > of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and
> > early 90s -- usually for Unix and Linux.
>
> It looks like this must have just gotten started. All that is present
> is xtartan. Which I do at least remember. :)
>
If you go read their Mastodon feed, you'll see that there's a bunch of
others...
> Library support is going to be an issue for a lot of X11 legacy apps.
>
Indeed... There was quite the diversity back in the day...
> I remember that the XForms widget library used to be proprietary, and I
> recall that it had been freed, but not that this had been done 20 years
> ago now[1][2]...albeit still too late to have made itself the center of
> the Linux desktop environment, as it could have been if only the
> copyright holders had not clung so tightly to The Precious.
>
Yea, it was one of many early contenders.
> Motif and XView similarly got freed (the latter quite early in fact, as
> I recall...but night had already fallen for the SunView UI).
>
Yea, XView was actually free from the start (or almost the start), but
the SunView UII and programming model was a bit of a rough fit with
X11 and never caught on, even though XView was widely ported.
Motif was freed a few years later, in time for it to be used by a few
projects before people moved on to things like Gnome and Qt.
> But two tooklit variants I've heard of, I've never found out if they
> ever made their sources freely available: OLIT and MoOLIT.
>
Now those are two toolkits I've not heard of in a long time...
> As I understand it, OLIT was XView, but written on top of the X Toolkit
> Intrinsics library (Xt) as opposed to bypassing it and going straight to
> libX11.
>
Yes. OLIT implemented the OpenLook look and feel in the intrinsics
programming model. It shared no code with XView, though. Sun was
big on pushing OpenLook back in the day.
> And MoOLIT was, apparently, some kind of shim--whether it supplemented
> OLIT or replaced it, I am not sure--that, like XForms and Java's AWT,
> allowed you to to write a "look-and-feel-neutral" application.
>
IIRC, and we're reaching back across 30 years at this point, MoOLIT was
an attempt to implement both interaction models in one toolkit.
> As I recall, such efforts often failed because they abstracted only the
> intersection of available features rather than the union of them, so
> except for very simple UIs, programs didn't look or behave
> "idiomatically" anyway.
>
Yes. It was a poor implementation of all of them, and only kinda sorta
looked right. It was OK for some things, but serious programs had big
issues scaling.
> I'd be curious to hear people's recollections of these and especially to
> learn of any pointers to source.
>
I never was able to get my hands on binaries, despite trying to order them,
let alone sources. They wouldn't ship them to Solbourne for some reason
(well, the reason is below).
> Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS, which
> I never saw in the flesh.
>
NeWS was about 3 years before OpenLook, etc.
So I spent the 4 years just out of college in my second job at Solboune and
later ParkPlace and Openware. I did the OI toolkit and UIB interface
builder.
It was a C++ toolkit that implemented both Open Looks (both 2d and 3d
variants)
and Motif. It did it in a neutral manner that allowed better layout than
most other
toolkits of the time (many other multi-model toolkits had issues where
they'd
render incorrectly if the fonts changed, or the model added 3d noo-dads
that were
different sizes for OpenLook and Motif). The interface builder I worked on
would
allow people to create real programs since it would create the right
subclasses
for you, allow you to expand the base toolkit either through composition of
base objects, or via your own custom widgets.
I even engineered the OI giveaway for Linux in the 0.99 days.... But the C++
ABI issues meant it never went anywhere...
Sadly, there's little online about this toolkit these days. I found the
following, which
just gives the business news and no taste of the cool technology:
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/att_takes_solbournes_c_object_library_for_designing_user_interfaces
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/parcplace_systems_buys_solbournes_c_tool_division
and an early paper on the technology before the automatic layout code was
added:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Encapsulating-a-C%2B%2B-Library-Linton/2421abe44375dca4620b5dcb1e717f43e2c538a5
It was a cool ride... I can dig up more info if people are interested...
Warner
> Regards,
> Branden
>
> [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110718230734/http://xforms-toolkit.org/
> Nowadays its web site does not even mention its proprietary past.
>
> [2] Before that relicensing, I was part of a team at Progeny Linux
> Systems that was contracted by HP to port xforms (and a lot of other
> stuff) to IA-64. xforms was given to me because I was "the X guy"
> on staff. I don't remember it being difficult--just the usual
> long/int punning issues. I don't recollect now whether xforms had
> already been ported to Alpha or SPARC V9; it seems to me that it
> should have been by 2001, or would have been, had it been FLOSS.
>
> Great merriment was had in those days dogging on IA-64, but the more
> I learned about that ISA the more I liked it compared it to x86,
> though that may be damning it with faint praise. But apparently
> IA-64 made novel demands with respect to instruction sequencing that
> caused compiler writers--or perhaps more accurately the people who
> would have to pay compiler writers--squeal like pigs in hot oil.
> Intel had a similar "fiasco" with the iAPX 432 fifteen years before;
> that was the ISA for which, infamously, "Ada [was the] intended
> primary language for application programming." Ada was also
> reviled, ostenisbly because it was too damn hard to write a compiler
> for it, but probably also because its keyword inventory more closely
> resembled Pascal than C, which was already starting to eat the world
> in the mid-1980s. Strangely enough, as I understand it, the
> compiler innovations demanded by Ada and IA-64, respectively, came
> to be standard and expected, and their benefits enjoyed unthinkingly
> by x86 and C advocates. Thus do we reward innovation in this
> industry.
>
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
2022-12-25 21:38 ` josh
2022-12-25 21:47 ` Ron Natalie
@ 2022-12-26 6:26 ` arnold
2022-12-26 19:37 ` Jon Steinhart
1 sibling, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread
From: arnold @ 2022-12-26 6:26 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: joshnatis0, g.branden.robinson; +Cc: tuhs
josh <joshnatis0@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS, which
> > I never saw in the flesh.
>
> Branden,
>
> You may find this fellow’s archaeological dig on NeWS and PostScript
> interesting: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/788053163857379328
The link there gets to https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM
which has NeWS and a bunch of other stuff. Possibly worth copying
into the TUHS archive.
Arnold
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: X11 Conservancy Project
2022-12-25 18:15 [TUHS] X11 Conservancy Project Michelangelo De Simone
2022-12-25 19:16 ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
2022-12-25 20:51 ` [TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project) G. Branden Robinson
@ 2022-12-26 9:59 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Lars Brinkhoff @ 2022-12-26 9:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Michelangelo De Simone; +Cc: tuhs
Is this limited to X11? The oldest X version I have seen around is
X10R3, but rumor has it earlier versions exist on tapes which have not
yet been read. We're also missing W.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)
2022-12-26 6:26 ` arnold
@ 2022-12-26 19:37 ` Jon Steinhart
0 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Jon Steinhart @ 2022-12-26 19:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: tuhs
arnold@skeeve.com writes:
> josh <joshnatis0@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS, which
> > > I never saw in the flesh.
> >
> > Branden,
> >
> > You may find this fellow’s archaeological dig on NeWS and PostScript
> > interesting: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/788053163857379328
>
> The link there gets to https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM
> which has NeWS and a bunch of other stuff. Possibly worth copying
> into the TUHS archive.
>
> Arnold
Ah, 'tis the season for old past follies.
Somewhere I have an old Christmas card that Dave Lavalle helped me make
for James Gosling using NeWS and taking advantage of the color printer
that had somehow been justified. I'll scan it when I find it. The
text of it was "Merry X-Mess and a Happy NeWS Year".
Related to all this, the original PostScript source has recently been
made available.
My major beef with NeWS was that it perpetuated the awful X input model
where everything had to be rectangles. NeWS greatly improved graphics
but not input. Being an ancient graphics person, I thought that it should
have followed the "pick identifier" model from the traditional (light pen)
vector graphics days where identifiers could be associated with objects
that were reported when they were selected. NeWS could have done amazing
things by adding a pick identifier to the graphics context, and in the
PostScript way having that be polymorphic. Would have greatly simplified
a lot of user interaction programming to be able to associate a function
with an object, and to not have to have a bazillion separate input
rectangle for each part of a window border and so on.
Jon
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
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2022-12-25 18:15 [TUHS] X11 Conservancy Project Michelangelo De Simone
2022-12-25 19:16 ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
2022-12-25 19:57 ` Michael Kjörling
2022-12-25 20:51 ` [TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project) G. Branden Robinson
2022-12-25 21:03 ` [TUHS] " Brad Spencer
2022-12-25 21:38 ` josh
2022-12-25 21:47 ` Ron Natalie
2022-12-26 6:26 ` arnold
2022-12-26 19:37 ` Jon Steinhart
2022-12-26 4:18 ` Warner Losh
2022-12-26 9:59 ` [TUHS] Re: X11 Conservancy Project Lars Brinkhoff
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