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* [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux
@ 2023-02-25 21:31 Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-02-25 22:49 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
                   ` (6 more replies)
  0 siblings, 7 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal @ 2023-02-25 21:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs


I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.

Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.

By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.

In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.

So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:

- were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?

- was there any discussion of alternatives to X?

- was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
@ 2023-02-25 22:49 ` Dan Cross
  2023-02-26  1:27   ` Larry McVoy
  2023-02-26  0:39 ` Warner Losh
                   ` (5 subsequent siblings)
  6 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2023-02-25 22:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 4:31 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
>
> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
>
> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
>
> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>
> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
>
> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?

Not really. The context at the time was that a lot of folks (well, me)
wanted a workstation-like experience, but on a machine we could
individually afford. That basically meant bringing over most of the
staples one was used to on a (Sun|DEC|HP|SGI) machine, which almost
universally implied X as a prerequisite. Folks wanted to be able to
use their customized shell startup files and so on, but also their
window manager configurations and the like.

That said, it was my impression that it took a year or two for X on
Linux to really get going, and further that it was really flakey for a
while afterwards; you had to have just the right combination of video
adapter, monitor, mouse, etc. Before that, I'm sure people played
around with mgr and stuff like that, but I don't think anyone really
_wanted_ anything substantially different.

> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?

Not really. Again, the context is very important here: when Linux
started to become a thing, a lot of people who started working with it
already had experience with "real" computers, but those machines were
not cheap. It was rare, but some people could afford workstation-class
hardware at home; most could not. If you weren't independently
wealthy, you made do with a PC or something. But the idea that you
could replicate your work or research computing environment home was
tremendously exciting. Again, more often than not, that meant X.

> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?

I have a vague memory that most people wanted to keep this out of the
kernel to the extent possible. X did most of the heavy lifting in
userspace, writing to a memory-mapped framebuffer; if you could do the
minimum to set that up and mmap it into the X server process, you were
good to go. But I may be wrong on this.

        - Dan C.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-02-25 22:49 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
@ 2023-02-26  0:39 ` Warner Losh
  2023-02-26  1:14   ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  2023-02-26 15:50   ` Leah Neukirchen
  2023-02-26  2:21 ` Jonathan Gray
                   ` (4 subsequent siblings)
  6 siblings, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2023-02-26  0:39 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 2:31 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:

>
> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all
> that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my
> wrist.
>
> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and
> windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only
> discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that
> time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib
> was still around but already abandoned.
>
> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the
> workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and
> pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early
> Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a
> different system than X would have made sense.
>
> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for
> top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade
> before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early
> browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far
> as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with
> a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot
> find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>
> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list
> might remember:
>
> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?


No. Mgr was available but harder to setup than X. This is from like 0.98pl5
or so days, so very early on...

- was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>

Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.

There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used
them.

- was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was
> appropriate?
>

Some. But mostly it was to switch graphics modes between x11 and console
apps. Very little beyond that.

By the time Linux arrived, x11 had already won in the workstation space, so
the quick push was to get x11 going. It wasn't long before everything was
XFree86 (or XFree98 if you were in Japan).

Warner

>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  0:39 ` Warner Losh
@ 2023-02-26  1:14   ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  2023-02-26 15:50   ` Leah Neukirchen
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Steffen Nurpmeso @ 2023-02-26  1:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Warner Losh; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

Warner Losh wrote in
 <CANCZdfrmiq0qxKxrEWVAwTa5RjNG_Tq-9JATAA7qR2=cva_4+w@mail.gmail.com>:
 |On Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 2:31 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
 ...
 |> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
 ...
 |No. Mgr was available but harder to setup than X. This is from like 0.98pl5
 |or so days, so very early on...
 |
 |- was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
 |
 |Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.
 |
 |There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used
 |them.

There was (and is) directfb.  It seems it never really started
over, but i actually track its successor [1] due to interest.  It
was one of my plans, over twenty years ago (there was an article
in either German Linux Magazine or German computer magazine c't on
it), to have nothing but myself, it and the kernel.  (And PDF
viewer and image viewer that existed and i think exist.  Graphical
browser was not soo much necessary by then.)  (That sprung into
existence when after a Halloween Linux Red Hat clone update
i suddenly found myself in a graphical framebuffer.  My "desktop"
is a full-window screen->tmux session with multiple windows, and
sometimes firefox beside it; rxvt-unicode earlier, but basically
the same.)

  [1] https://github.com/directfb2/DirectFB2.git

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 22:49 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
@ 2023-02-26  1:27   ` Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2023-02-26  1:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, tuhs

On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 05:49:36PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
> 
> Not really. The context at the time was that a lot of folks (well, me)
> wanted a workstation-like experience, but on a machine we could
> individually afford. That basically meant bringing over most of the
> staples one was used to on a (Sun|DEC|HP|SGI) machine, which almost
> universally implied X as a prerequisite. Folks wanted to be able to
> use their customized shell startup files and so on, but also their
> window manager configurations and the like.

Yep, this exactly.  I was the weird who carried around an X10 tape,
then an X11 tape, and built all that so it ran on (Sun|DEC|HP|SGI).
I despised all those fancy guis that $VENDOR built, I just wanted
to get work done and I wanted to do it as much as possible the
same way on each box.

So when Linux came around, hello X!

--lm

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-02-25 22:49 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
  2023-02-26  0:39 ` Warner Losh
@ 2023-02-26  2:21 ` Jonathan Gray
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-02-26  2:27 ` Will Senn
                   ` (3 subsequent siblings)
  6 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Jonathan Gray @ 2023-02-26  2:21 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 10:31:22PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> 
> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
> 
> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
> 
> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
> 
> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.

The Berlin project started incorporating code from the earlier Fresco
project, and then renamed to Fresco.  The earlier Fresco was not a window
system, and was at one point distributed by the X Consortium and
Fujitsu's Advanced Software Lab (faslab)
http://web.archive.org/web/20020807002842/http://wiki.fresco.org/index.cgi/ArchitectureQuestions
http://web.archive.org/web/19980121223254/http://www.iuk.tu-harburg.de/fresco/

The kernel parts seem more along the lines of mode setting than a GUI.

> 
> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
> 
> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
> 
> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
> 
> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?
> 
> 
> 

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
                   ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2023-02-26  2:21 ` Jonathan Gray
@ 2023-02-26  2:27 ` Will Senn
  2023-02-26  2:30 ` Will Senn
                   ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  6 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2023-02-26  2:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Hi Paul,

I remember downloading SLS with X ( a bunch of floppy images) over a 300 
baud connection via a VMS gateway to the internet somewhere in late 1991 
or early 1992. I think this might have been less than a year after the 
0.9 kernel was released. So, if there was something prior to X, it was 
extremely short lived. Slackware took SLS and bundled it with X 
providing that as a basis for a Linux kit, so to speak, and I seem to 
remember everybody I know using that until Redhat came along and Debian, 
etc. Of course there were others, but SLS/X and Slackware were early, 
early days.

Will

On 2/25/23 3:31 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
>
> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
>
> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
>
> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>
> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
>
> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
>
> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>
> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?
>
>


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
                   ` (3 preceding siblings ...)
  2023-02-26  2:27 ` Will Senn
@ 2023-02-26  2:30 ` Will Senn
  2023-02-26  2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
  2023-02-27 20:56 ` Will Senn
  6 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2023-02-26  2:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Oh and lest we forget, Yggdrasil, in Nov. 1992 did X on Linux.

Will

On 2/25/23 3:31 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
>
> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
>
> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
>
> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>
> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
>
> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
>
> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>
> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?
>
>


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
                   ` (4 preceding siblings ...)
  2023-02-26  2:30 ` Will Senn
@ 2023-02-26  2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
  2023-02-26  3:28   ` Dan Cross
                     ` (2 more replies)
  2023-02-27 20:56 ` Will Senn
  6 siblings, 3 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Theodore Ts'o @ 2023-02-26  2:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

I think it's fair to say that in the very early days of Linux, most of
the people who were using it were people who kernel hackers; and so we
didn't have all that many people who were interested in developing new
windowing systems.  We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms
and Emacs windows.

In fact, support for X Windows predated the development of a
networking stack; we had Unix domain sockets, so that was enough for
X, but we didn't have a working networking stack at that point!  I
would be running X, and then running C-Kermit to download files from
MIT over a dialup modem.

At that point, X windows wasn't *flaky* per se, but remember that back
then monitors were very persnicky about exactly what resolutions and
frequences they would accept.  And this was before monitors supported
EDID (Extended Display Identification Data), which allowed the X
server to figure out what the parameters were of the monitor.  So that
meant that configuring the X server with the correct resolution,
frequencies, etc., was tricky.  There were long and complex documents
explaining how to do it, and it was a very manual process.  If you got
the calculations wrong, the image might not be stable, but that wasn't
a software bug so much as it was a configuration error.

There were programs (for example, the most famous was the graphical
game "Tuxracer") which wrote directly to the frame buffer, but there
wasn't anyone who was interested in developing their own compositor.
We just wanted xterms and (later) Firefox to work!

As far as discussion about what should and shouldn't go into the
kernel, most people agreed that as much as possible, especially in
graphics land, should be out of the kernel.  The fact that we didn't
have a lot of graphics specialists in the kernel development
community, and that in those early days the vast majority of Linux
boxen where single user machines just sealed the deal.

   	       	      	  	  	  - Ted

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
@ 2023-02-26  3:28   ` Dan Cross
  2023-02-26  3:45     ` Warner Losh
  2023-02-26  5:24   ` John Cowan
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2023-02-26  3:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Theodore Ts'o; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, tuhs

On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 9:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> I think it's fair to say that in the very early days of Linux, most of
> the people who were using it were people who kernel hackers; and so we
> didn't have all that many people who were interested in developing new
> windowing systems.  We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms
> and Emacs windows.

This is another important thing to bear in mind: this predates the
explosion of the world wide web; most people back then paradoxically
ran a lot more local software on their machines (applications weren't
de facto mediated by a web browser), but a lot of that software was
simpler. xterm and a text editor and a lot of folks were good to go.

> In fact, support for X Windows predated the development of a
> networking stack; we had Unix domain sockets, so that was enough for
> X, but we didn't have a working networking stack at that point!  I
> would be running X, and then running C-Kermit to download files from
> MIT over a dialup modem.

!!

> At that point, X windows wasn't *flaky* per se, but remember that back
> then monitors were very persnicky about exactly what resolutions and
> frequences they would accept.  And this was before monitors supported
> EDID (Extended Display Identification Data), which allowed the X
> server to figure out what the parameters were of the monitor.  So that
> meant that configuring the X server with the correct resolution,
> frequencies, etc., was tricky.  There were long and complex documents
> explaining how to do it, and it was a very manual process.  If you got
> the calculations wrong, the image might not be stable, but that wasn't
> a software bug so much as it was a configuration error.

Yeah, this: once you got something configured and working it wasn't
like it crashed all the time or anything like that. But getting it
working in the first place was challenging; it was a _far_ cry from
today, where it seems like most of the time, X "just works" out of the
box. Or even from most workstations of the era, which largely worked
with little or no tedious configuration (because the vendor had done
the hard work to bring X up on their hardware already).

But on x86, I recall that even slight perturbations in a system could
keep X from running. For example, one might have the right model of
xfree86-supported video card, but from a manufacturing run of cards
that did not work (because they used rev B of an internal component
instead of A, perhaps). Or the card might not work on a different
motherboard, etc.

Getting it working could be a real exercise in frustration.

> There were programs (for example, the most famous was the graphical
> game "Tuxracer") which wrote directly to the frame buffer, but there
> wasn't anyone who was interested in developing their own compositor.
> We just wanted xterms and (later) Firefox to work!

Firefox? Wow, talk about a Johnny Come Lately. :-) I can still
remember compiling NCSA Mosaic on a SPARCstation 2. Those were the
days...very painful days....

        - Dan C.


> As far as discussion about what should and shouldn't go into the
> kernel, most people agreed that as much as possible, especially in
> graphics land, should be out of the kernel.  The fact that we didn't
> have a lot of graphics specialists in the kernel development
> community, and that in those early days the vast majority of Linux
> boxen where single user machines just sealed the deal.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  3:28   ` Dan Cross
@ 2023-02-26  3:45     ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2023-02-26  3:45 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4377 bytes --]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:29 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 9:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> > I think it's fair to say that in the very early days of Linux, most of
> > the people who were using it were people who kernel hackers; and so we
> > didn't have all that many people who were interested in developing new
> > windowing systems.  We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms
> > and Emacs windows.
>
> This is another important thing to bear in mind: this predates the
> explosion of the world wide web; most people back then paradoxically
> ran a lot more local software on their machines (applications weren't
> de facto mediated by a web browser), but a lot of that software was
> simpler. xterm and a text editor and a lot of folks were good to go.
>

The graphical www... Lynx was a thing for a long time... spent a lot of
time looking for info on how too boot Linux to get it going. Usenet
archives and mailing lists searching for clues. www and gopher and wais..

> In fact, support for X Windows predated the development of a
> > networking stack; we had Unix domain sockets, so that was enough for
> > X, but we didn't have a working networking stack at that point!  I
> > would be running X, and then running C-Kermit to download files from
> > MIT over a dialup modem.
>
> !!
>
> > At that point, X windows wasn't *flaky* per se, but remember that back
> > then monitors were very persnicky about exactly what resolutions and
> > frequences they would accept.  And this was before monitors supported
> > EDID (Extended Display Identification Data), which allowed the X
> > server to figure out what the parameters were of the monitor.  So that
> > meant that configuring the X server with the correct resolution,
> > frequencies, etc., was tricky.  There were long and complex documents
> > explaining how to do it, and it was a very manual process.  If you got
> > the calculations wrong, the image might not be stable, but that wasn't
> > a software bug so much as it was a configuration error.
>
> Yeah, this: once you got something configured and working it wasn't
> like it crashed all the time or anything like that. But getting it
> working in the first place was challenging; it was a _far_ cry from
> today, where it seems like most of the time, X "just works" out of the
> box. Or even from most workstations of the era, which largely worked
> with little or no tedious configuration (because the vendor had done
> the hard work to bring X up on their hardware already).
>
> But on x86, I recall that even slight perturbations in a system could
> keep X from running. For example, one might have the right model of
> xfree86-supported video card, but from a manufacturing run of cards
> that did not work (because they used rev B of an internal component
> instead of A, perhaps). Or the card might not work on a different
> motherboard, etc.
>
> Getting it working could be a real exercise in frustration.
>

Taught me patience as I brute forced a solution... then worked backwards to
make the next one work faster.... front porches and backporches seemed
concrete when reading the svga howtos...  that died a flaming death when I
read data sheets... wasn't until I read video demystified that I started to
get it... and only then because I was working with video engineers that
explained the differences... so yea..  super frustrating...

> There were programs (for example, the most famous was the graphical
> > game "Tuxracer") which wrote directly to the frame buffer, but there
> > wasn't anyone who was interested in developing their own compositor.
> > We just wanted xterms and (later) Firefox to work!
>
> Firefox? Wow, talk about a Johnny Come Lately. :-) I can still
> remember compiling NCSA Mosaic on a SPARCstation 2. Those were the
> days...very painful days....
>

Yes... lots of pain and patches and rebuilding... on slow machines...

Warner

>         - Dan C.
>
>
> > As far as discussion about what should and shouldn't go into the
> > kernel, most people agreed that as much as possible, especially in
> > graphics land, should be out of the kernel.  The fact that we didn't
> > have a lot of graphics specialists in the kernel development
> > community, and that in those early days the vast majority of Linux
> > boxen where single user machines just sealed the deal.
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
  2023-02-26  3:28   ` Dan Cross
@ 2023-02-26  5:24   ` John Cowan
  2023-02-26  5:36     ` Steve Nickolas
  2023-02-28  3:35     ` Dave Horsfall
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: John Cowan @ 2023-02-26  5:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Theodore Ts'o; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 672 bytes --]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 9:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:


> We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms
> and Emacs windows.
>

In fact that's pretty much what I do to this day: I do everything in
terminals and do browsing etc. elsewhere.

At that point, X windows wasn't *flaky* per se, but rem If you got
> the calculations wrong, the image might not be stable, but that wasn't
> a software bug so much as it was a configuration error.
>

However, most configuration errors can't reduce your hardware to a useless
pile of junk, whereas older CRT monitors could definitely be destroyed if
the configuration was too far off nominal.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  5:24   ` John Cowan
@ 2023-02-26  5:36     ` Steve Nickolas
  2023-02-28  3:35     ` Dave Horsfall
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Steve Nickolas @ 2023-02-26  5:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

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On Sun, 26 Feb 2023, John Cowan wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 9:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms
>> and Emacs windows.
>
> In fact that's pretty much what I do to this day: I do everything in
> terminals and do browsing etc. elsewhere.

I always keep at least one xterm (actually mate-terminal) open and do a 
lot of my work from it.  When I run GUI apps, they're almost always 
maximized on either one or the other of my two displays (exception for 
emulators, sometimes).  I have the desktop icons completely disabled.

-uso.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  0:39 ` Warner Losh
  2023-02-26  1:14   ` Steffen Nurpmeso
@ 2023-02-26 15:50   ` Leah Neukirchen
  2023-02-26 16:13     ` Larry McVoy
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Leah Neukirchen @ 2023-02-26 15:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Warner Losh; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> writes:

> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>>
>
> Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.
>
> There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used
> them.

I have some first hand experience with svgalib programs around 1999.
Back then I didn't have enough disk space to install X11 and TeX at
the same time, so I mostly worked on the 80x25 console and used
dvisvga as a previewer, which ran MetaFont in the background and then
rendered a quite readable preview of your DVI file.

I also remember using zgv, an image display program that used svgalib.
The fractal renderer XaoS also could do svgalib.

IIRC, my screen could only display 1024x768, not 1280x1024.

AFAIU, svgalib directly poked the graphics card memory on x86, so all
programs using it had to be SUID to allow this.  There was no
kernel-provided framebuffer, this came a bit later (2.1.109 says
Wikipedia; I used kernel 2.0.36 back then), but by then I had switched
to X11 already.

hth,
-- 
Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org/

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26 15:50   ` Leah Neukirchen
@ 2023-02-26 16:13     ` Larry McVoy
  2023-02-26 16:23       ` Leah Neukirchen
                         ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2023-02-26 16:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Leah Neukirchen; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 04:50:34PM +0100, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
> Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> writes:
> 
> > - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
> >>
> >
> > Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.
> >
> > There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used
> > them.
> 
> Back then I didn't have enough disk space to install X11 and TeX at
> the same time, so I mostly worked on the 80x25 console

screen(1) was my go to back in the days of limited resources.  Especially
screen -r so you could detach, come back the next day and have all your
setup right there.

Wasn't that fancy but oh so useful.  I'm with Ted in that we just wanted
a bunch of terminal windows.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26 16:13     ` Larry McVoy
@ 2023-02-26 16:23       ` Leah Neukirchen
  2023-02-26 16:32         ` Warner Losh
  2023-02-26 16:39         ` Will Senn
  2023-02-26 19:58       ` Dave Horsfall
  2023-02-27 10:09       ` Ralph Corderoy
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Leah Neukirchen @ 2023-02-26 16:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> writes:

> On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 04:50:34PM +0100, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
>> Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> writes:
>> 
>> > - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>> >>
>> >
>> > Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.
>> >
>> > There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used
>> > them.
>> 
>> Back then I didn't have enough disk space to install X11 and TeX at
>> the same time, so I mostly worked on the 80x25 console
>
> screen(1) was my go to back in the days of limited resources.  Especially
> screen -r so you could detach, come back the next day and have all your
> setup right there.
>
> Wasn't that fancy but oh so useful.  I'm with Ted in that we just wanted
> a bunch of terminal windows.

Curiously, I learned about screen only way later, when I used remote
systems.  But I made getty spawn on 12 ttys, so that worked as well to
multitask.

-- 
Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26 16:23       ` Leah Neukirchen
@ 2023-02-26 16:32         ` Warner Losh
  2023-02-26 16:39         ` Will Senn
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2023-02-26 16:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Leah Neukirchen; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1404 bytes --]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 9:23 AM Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> wrote:

> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> writes:
>
> > On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 04:50:34PM +0100, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
> >> Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> writes:
> >>
> >> > - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
> >> >>
> >> >
> >> > Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.
> >> >
> >> > There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never
> used
> >> > them.
> >>
> >> Back then I didn't have enough disk space to install X11 and TeX at
> >> the same time, so I mostly worked on the 80x25 console
> >
> > screen(1) was my go to back in the days of limited resources.  Especially
> > screen -r so you could detach, come back the next day and have all your
> > setup right there.
> >
> > Wasn't that fancy but oh so useful.  I'm with Ted in that we just wanted
> > a bunch of terminal windows.
>
> Curiously, I learned about screen only way later, when I used remote
> systems.  But I made getty spawn on 12 ttys, so that worked as well to
> multitask.
>

That's a trick that dates back to the 80s. Different Unixes did that. I
first saw it on the DEC Rainbow running an enhanced Venix (V7) in like 1987
where you had 4 consoles, but no job control.... SCO System V did it in the
late 80s too. I think the pre system V Xenix did too.

Warner


-- 
> Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26 16:23       ` Leah Neukirchen
  2023-02-26 16:32         ` Warner Losh
@ 2023-02-26 16:39         ` Will Senn
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2023-02-26 16:39 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Leah Neukirchen; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

Same here. The virtual terminals worked for me (and still do) until I start doing ssh, then screen and tmux are lifesavers. 

Will

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 26, 2023, at 10:23 AM, Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> wrote:
> 
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> writes:
> 
>>> On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 04:50:34PM +0100, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
>>> Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> writes:
>>> 
>>>> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.
>>>> 
>>>> There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used
>>>> them.
>>> 
>>> Back then I didn't have enough disk space to install X11 and TeX at
>>> the same time, so I mostly worked on the 80x25 console
>> 
>> screen(1) was my go to back in the days of limited resources.  Especially
>> screen -r so you could detach, come back the next day and have all your
>> setup right there.
>> 
>> Wasn't that fancy but oh so useful.  I'm with Ted in that we just wanted
>> a bunch of terminal windows.
> 
> Curiously, I learned about screen only way later, when I used remote
> systems.  But I made getty spawn on 12 ttys, so that worked as well to
> multitask.
> 
> -- 
> Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26 16:13     ` Larry McVoy
  2023-02-26 16:23       ` Leah Neukirchen
@ 2023-02-26 19:58       ` Dave Horsfall
  2023-02-27  0:16         ` Adam Thornton
  2023-02-27 10:09       ` Ralph Corderoy
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2023-02-26 19:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Sun, 26 Feb 2023, Larry McVoy wrote:

> screen(1) was my go to back in the days of limited resources.  
> Especially screen -r so you could detach, come back the next day and 
> have all your setup right there.

And the ability to copy'n'paste between screens...

> Wasn't that fancy but oh so useful.  I'm with Ted in that we just wanted 
> a bunch of terminal windows.

Yep; even on my Mac I don't use the Finder, just multiple Terminals.

-- Dave

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26 19:58       ` Dave Horsfall
@ 2023-02-27  0:16         ` Adam Thornton
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Adam Thornton @ 2023-02-27  0:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dave Horsfall; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 215 bytes --]

Back in...1993, I think (maybe 92), I ran mgr for a while on Linux because
X required a Tseng ET4000 video card, which I did not have.  Eventually X
got a generic SVGA driver and I was able to start using it.

Adam

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26 16:13     ` Larry McVoy
  2023-02-26 16:23       ` Leah Neukirchen
  2023-02-26 19:58       ` Dave Horsfall
@ 2023-02-27 10:09       ` Ralph Corderoy
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Ralph Corderoy @ 2023-02-27 10:09 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Hi,

Larry wrote:
> screen(1) was my go to back in the days of limited resources.
> Especially screen -r so you could detach, come back the next day and
> have all your setup right there.

A beefed up version today is to vncviewer(1) over SSH into a desktop on
a beefy CPU server where vncserver has been set running for a particular
user.  Everything is as it was left and modern X is happy to adjust on
the fly to the screen dimensions of the current viewer.  Doesn't have
Plan 9's elegance, but still gives utility.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
  2023-02-26  3:28   ` Dan Cross
  2023-02-26  5:24   ` John Cowan
@ 2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2023-02-27 17:59     ` Arno Griffioen via TUHS
                       ` (4 more replies)
  2 siblings, 5 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS @ 2023-02-27 17:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs


Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.

What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer. It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.

This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense.

===

It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.

It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?





^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  2:21 ` Jonathan Gray
@ 2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-02-27 18:32     ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal @ 2023-02-27 17:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs


> On 26 Feb 2023, at 03:21, Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 10:31:22PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>> 
>> I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
> 
> The Berlin project started incorporating code from the earlier Fresco
> project, and then renamed to Fresco.

Thank you for those links, that refreshed my memory. Yes, this was the project that I had lingering my mind. At the time I had the impression it was dependent on the GGI (General Graphics Interface) project and its kernel part (KGI, Kernel Graphics Interface).

It would seem to me that there was a fair amount of complaining about X in the 1998-2004 time frame, beyond the complexity of getting it configured. The key complaints seem to have been:
- The XShm is a poor fix for fast local operations (it opened the door for X as a compositor though)
- There is no standard widget set (too many credible runners: Gtk, Qt, Tk, FLTK, etc.)
- The server should handle basic widget interaction, not the client.
- There is no alpha blending

The proposed fixes include Berlin/GGI/KGI, DirectFB and Y-windows (http://www.y-windows.org); probably there are others. None of these seem to have had much traction (with the possible exception of DirectFB).

Am I missing major initiatives in this space?




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
@ 2023-02-27 17:59     ` Arno Griffioen via TUHS
  2023-02-27 18:07     ` Warner Losh
                       ` (3 subsequent siblings)
  4 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Arno Griffioen via TUHS @ 2023-02-27 17:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 06:22:09PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote:
> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the 
> market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on 
> being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design 
> elements. 

In my experience, compared to the above, many AmigaOS users would use the 
Workbench environment a lot more like the X windows setup.

Aka. with several concurrent 'shell' windows open and having access on 
later versions to native scripting langauges like REXX and such to even 
automate 'windowed' applications.

And even though AmigaOS also had lots of built-in libraries and 
style guide stuff, many programmers would still do things s lot more
their own way as far as look&feel went than for instance on MacOS.
(and yes... it often was a bit of mess like X can be ;) )

Not sure if the fact that things like Windows and MacOS were basically
single-tasking or at best cooperative multitasking also influenced
the use (enforcement?) of their standardised look&feel and code.

Aka. breaking the mould just wasn't useful for programmers on these
platforms or was perhaps even detrimental to the user?

							Bye, Arno.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2023-02-27 17:59     ` Arno Griffioen via TUHS
@ 2023-02-27 18:07     ` Warner Losh
  2023-02-27 20:04     ` [TUHS] Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux] arnold
                       ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  4 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2023-02-27 18:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2625 bytes --]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 10:22 AM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
wrote:

>
> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
>
> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what
> the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer. It
> seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches
> with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a
> generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days
> in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple
> terminals.
>
> This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The
> earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix
> from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top
> level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas,
> with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of
> sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the
> Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2.
> In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes
> sense.
>
> ===
>
> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the
> market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on
> being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design
> elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for
> technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the
> Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer
> demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.
>
> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for
> X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.).
> The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem
> to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?
>

ParcPlace produced the OI/uib linux port in 93 as well, even made standard
floppies for it. Sadly, it didn't turn into sales, so we walked away form
the Linux port, at least outside the building... OI/uib was an attempt to
write your UI apps once, and use them with whatever look and feel the end
user wanted... It was cool for the time, but things have evolved since then
away from both OpenLook and Motif... and while the look and most of the
feel was the same, X was, and continues to be, a mess because there's no
standard cut and paste keys....

Warner

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal
@ 2023-02-27 18:32     ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2023-02-27 18:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 172 bytes --]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 10:23 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:

> Am I missing major initiatives in this space?
>

Key bindings are not unified.

Warner

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2023-02-27 17:59     ` Arno Griffioen via TUHS
  2023-02-27 18:07     ` Warner Losh
@ 2023-02-27 20:04     ` arnold
  2023-02-27 20:08       ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
  2023-02-27 20:30     ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Dan Cross
  2023-02-28  1:08     ` Jonathan Gray
  4 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: arnold @ 2023-02-27 20:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs, pnr

Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe
> today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio,
> Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.

For sure. And it's also the 30- and 40-somethings. In my experience
over the past 18 years, almost nobody in those age groups is comfortable
with a terminal or screen editor, even though they often work in
environments where a command line is all they have (ssh, and/or
docker exec).

The IDE is for coding and searching files, and maybe Notepad++
for finding stuff in non-code files (log output).

IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the
almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
would be faster.

It's terribly sad.

Arnold

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:04     ` [TUHS] Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux] arnold
@ 2023-02-27 20:08       ` Chet Ramey
  2023-02-27 20:22         ` arnold
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Chet Ramey @ 2023-02-27 20:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: arnold, tuhs, pnr

On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the
> almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
> would be faster.

Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web
and barely understand, if at all.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:08       ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
@ 2023-02-27 20:22         ` arnold
  2023-02-27 20:46           ` segaloco via TUHS
  2023-02-27 20:50           ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: arnold @ 2023-02-27 20:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: chet.ramey; +Cc: tuhs

Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:

> On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the
> > almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
> > would be faster.
>
> Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web
> and barely understand, if at all.

Yeah, really.

I do what I can, but it's a very steep uphill battle, as most
don't even understand that they're missing something, or that
they could learn it if they wanted to.

I think I'll stop ranting before I really get going. :-)

Arnold

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
                       ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2023-02-27 20:04     ` [TUHS] Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux] arnold
@ 2023-02-27 20:30     ` Dan Cross
  2023-02-28  1:10       ` Alexis
  2023-03-01 16:39       ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-02-28  1:08     ` Jonathan Gray
  4 siblings, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2023-02-27 20:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
>
> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.

While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
used regularly.

Some I remember where `gv` to look at PostScript documents, `xv` to
view image files, `gnuplot` could generate plots in a window, `xdvi`
to look at TeX/LaTeX output, and text editors like `emacs` had X
front-ends that offered syntax highlighting and the like; some folks I
knew liked `nedit`. `exmh` was my preferred email client for a while,
and things like `xman` (was there a `tkman`, too?) was nice. Some
system monitoring tools `xload` were considered essentials; `xbiff`
could be useful (I could have sworn there was a `tkbiff`, too). A
clock like `xclock` or `oclock` or something was also nice. Some folks
liked graphical newsreaders, chat programs (I guess IRC was a thing
back then, and I believe some `talk` client had an X front-end). There
was a fractal viewer that I thought was fun, but I don't remember it
much anymore (even the name...). Oh, and lots of games; I had a nice
Solitaire version that I can no longer recall the name of. `xeyes` was
cute, and running `xroach` was a popular (?) prank for an unsuspecting
(but amenable) colleague.

A lot of us spent a lot of time customizing our environments, and many
eschewed the vendor-standard environment. For instance, a lot of
people I knew used `twm` and derivatives (`ctwm` and `tvtwm` were
popular), and spent a lot of time tweaking menus and stuff to set
things up the way we liked. A lot of folks also wrote custom tools
using `tk` or `expectk`. Giving all of that up to run on Linux was a
bitter pill to swallow, so there was a real impetus to get X running
quickly. Personally, I kept my `tvtwm`-based environment going until I
switched to plan9 and then to the Mac as a daily driver. I'm not sure
I miss it, but at the time it was head-and-shoulders above anything
you could get on Windows or (classic) MacOS.

So it wasn't just that people wanted a "familiar terminal multiplexor"
as that people wanted the environments they had put a lot of time and
energy into building up for themselves, and again, that often meant X.

> It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.

I think it probably depends on what people are doing. I more or less
switched to using VS Code for my editor, and I'm using a Mac Studio to
write this, but my desktop is still littered with terminal windows,
I've got a `drawterm` session open to my local Plan 9 network, and am
logged into a bunch of old systems (Multics, TOPS-20, VMS, an IBM
mainframe, CDC Cyber, RSTS/E, PR1ME), etc.

But the way we write software has changed pretty dramatically in the
last 3 or so decades. I used to start with an empty C file and write
my stuff. Things like linked-lists? Mostly implemented by hand. These
days, there are other languages and vast collections of libraries for
almost anything imaginable; much of what "programming" is today is
glueing together different libraries and making them interact in
sophisticated, often quite complex ways. I don't know that it's
better, nor that it's always worse, but it is qualitatively different.
So almost necessarily the toolsets and environment have changed
accordingly.

> This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense.

It may be instructive to look at the early X window managers in this
regard.  One I remember was `uwm` (I think); I recall being struck
that it reminded me of rio when I saw it.

> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.

I remember the X mantra was, "mechanism, not policy." Which was fine,
except that there wasn't much of even a default policy, which made X
(IMHO) a bit of a bear to program and meant that interfaces were
pretty wildly inconsistent across programs. By contrast, writing
simple programs to draw lines on the Mac was easy.

Interestingly, frustration with this caused an almost cambrian
explosion of new windowing environments within a few years of Linux's
arrival on the scene. From larger efforts like Gtk (and then GNOME),
KDE, GNUStep (which I guess might predate Linux, but not by much...),
etc, to less ambitious things components like fvwm and Enlightenment,
we kind of went from "OpenWindows or Motif or roll your own stuff
around twm or something" to a whole plethora of things. It's still a
bit of a mess, though.

> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?

Lots!  See above.

        - Dan C.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:22         ` arnold
@ 2023-02-27 20:46           ` segaloco via TUHS
  2023-02-27 21:04             ` Dan Cross
  2023-02-28  7:59             ` arnold
  2023-02-27 20:50           ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
  1 sibling, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: segaloco via TUHS @ 2023-02-27 20:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: arnold; +Cc: tuhs

I see the wisdom in your last line there, I've typed and deleted a response to this email 4 times, each one more convoluted than the last.

The short of my stance though is, as a younger programmer (29), I am certainly not a fan of these trends that are all too common in my generation.  That said, I've set foot in one single softare-related class in my life (highschool Java class) and so I don't really know what is being taught to folks going the traditional routes.  All I know from my one abortive semester of college is that I didn't see a whole lot of reliance on individual exploration of concepts in classes, just everyone working to a one-size-fits-all understanding of how to be a good employee in a given subject area.  Of course, this is also influenced by my philosophy and biases and such, and only represents 4-5 months of observation, but if my minimal experience with college is to be believed, I have little faith that educational programs are producing much more than meat filters between StackOverflow and <insert code editor here>.  No offense to said meat filters, people gotta work, but there is something lost when the constant march of production torpedoes individual creativity.  Then again, do big firms want sophisticated engineers or are we too far gone into assembly line programming with no personal connection to any of the products?  I'm glad I'm as personally involved in the stuff I work with, I could see myself slipping into the same patterns of apathy if I was a nameless face in a sea of coders on some project I don't even know the legal name of any given day.

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Monday, February 27th, 2023 at 12:22 PM, arnold@skeeve.com <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:


> Chet Ramey chet.ramey@case.edu wrote:
> 
> > On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > 
> > > IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the
> > > almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
> > > would be faster.
> > 
> > Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web
> > and barely understand, if at all.
> 
> 
> Yeah, really.
> 
> I do what I can, but it's a very steep uphill battle, as most
> don't even understand that they're missing something, or that
> they could learn it if they wanted to.
> 
> I think I'll stop ranting before I really get going. :-)
> 
> Arnold

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:22         ` arnold
  2023-02-27 20:46           ` segaloco via TUHS
@ 2023-02-27 20:50           ` Chet Ramey
  2023-02-27 20:55             ` Bakul Shah
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Chet Ramey @ 2023-02-27 20:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: arnold; +Cc: tuhs

On 2/27/23 3:22 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>
>>> IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the
>>> almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
>>> would be faster.
>>
>> Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web
>> and barely understand, if at all.
> 
> Yeah, really.
> 
> I do what I can, but it's a very steep uphill battle, as most
> don't even understand that they're missing something, or that
> they could learn it if they wanted to.
> 
> I think I'll stop ranting before I really get going. :-)

Or the horror show that is

wget -O - https://some-random-place/random-script.sh | bash

(or worse, | sudo bash).

Seriously, people, just stop depending so completely on the kindness of
strangers.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:50           ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
@ 2023-02-27 20:55             ` Bakul Shah
  2023-02-27 21:01               ` segaloco via TUHS
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2023-02-27 20:55 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: chet.ramey; +Cc: tuhs

On Feb 27, 2023, at 12:50 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> 
> Or the horror show that is
> 
> wget -O - https://some-random-place/random-script.sh | bash
> 
> (or worse, | sudo bash).
> 
> Seriously, people, just stop depending so completely on the kindness of
> strangers.

Beware of geeks bearing gifts!

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
                   ` (5 preceding siblings ...)
  2023-02-26  2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
@ 2023-02-27 20:56 ` Will Senn
  2023-02-27 22:14   ` Andru Luvisi
  2023-02-27 22:31   ` David Arnold
  6 siblings, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2023-02-27 20:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Paul,
While the background information on X alternatives is interesting, I 
think there's some conflation going on. The distance in time between the 
linux kernel being posted and X being available on it was an eyeblink, 
even back then. There was no serious effort to look at other windowing 
systems in between "hey, what do y'all think of my new kernel - it runs 
gnu stuff" to "here it is with X and X apps".

That said, it was a pain to configure, required just the right mix of 
video hardware and other hardware, and wasn't for the faint of heart. As 
X was becoming available on linux licketysplit, some folks either 
couldn't get it running or didn't have the hardware - those folks were 
probably the first to go looking at alternatives, but that didn't 
precede the x on linux effort.

Will

On 2/25/23 3:31 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
>
> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
>
> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
>
> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>
> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
>
> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
>
> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>
> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?
>
>


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:55             ` Bakul Shah
@ 2023-02-27 21:01               ` segaloco via TUHS
  2023-02-27 21:15                 ` Chet Ramey
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: segaloco via TUHS @ 2023-02-27 21:01 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Bakul Shah; +Cc: tuhs

The official Rust book lists a blind script grab from a website piped into a shell as their "official" install mechanism.

To make matters worse, you can't "-O" it with curl as it is the root of its host, so no filename...

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Monday, February 27th, 2023 at 12:55 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:


> On Feb 27, 2023, at 12:50 PM, Chet Ramey chet.ramey@case.edu wrote:
> 
> > Or the horror show that is
> > 
> > wget -O - https://some-random-place/random-script.sh | bash
> > 
> > (or worse, | sudo bash).
> > 
> > Seriously, people, just stop depending so completely on the kindness of
> > strangers.
> 
> 
> Beware of geeks bearing gifts!

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:46           ` segaloco via TUHS
@ 2023-02-27 21:04             ` Dan Cross
  2023-02-28  7:59             ` arnold
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2023-02-27 21:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: segaloco; +Cc: COFF

[Redirecting to COFF; TUHS to Bcc:]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 3:46 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> I see the wisdom in your last line there, I've typed and deleted a response to this email 4 times, each one more convoluted than the last.
>
> The short of my stance though is, as a younger programmer (29), I am certainly not a fan of these trends that are all too common in my generation.  That said, I've set foot in one single softare-related class in my life (highschool Java class) and so I don't really know what is being taught to folks going the traditional routes.  All I know from my one abortive semester of college is that I didn't see a whole lot of reliance on individual exploration of concepts in classes, just everyone working to a one-size-fits-all understanding of how to be a good employee in a given subject area.  Of course, this is also influenced by my philosophy and biases and such, and only represents 4-5 months of observation, but if my minimal experience with college is to be believed, I have little faith that educational programs are producing much more than meat filters between StackOverflow and <insert code editor here>.  No offense to said meat filters, people gotta work, but there is something lost when the constant march of production torpedoes individual creativity.  Then again, do big firms want sophisticated engineers or are we too far gone into assembly line programming with no personal connection to any of the products?  I'm glad I'm as personally involved in the stuff I work with, I could see myself slipping into the same patterns of apathy if I was a nameless face in a sea of coders on some project I don't even know the legal name of any given day.

This is an extraordinarily complicated subject, and it's really full
of nuance. In general, I think your categorization is unfair.

It sounds like you had a bad experience in your first semester of
college. I can sympathize; I did too.

But a thing to bear in mind is that in the first year, universities
are taking kids (and yes, they are kids...sorry young folks, I don't
mean that as a pejorative, but consider the context! For most young
people this is their first experience living on their own, their first
_real_ taste of freedom, and the first where they're about to be
subject to rigorous academic expectations without a lot of systemic
support) with wildly uneven academic and social backgrounds and
preparing them for advanced study in a particular field...one that
most haven't even identified for themselves yet. For the precocious
student, this will feel stifling; for many others it will be a
struggle. What, perhaps, you see as lack of intellectual curiosity may
have in fact been the outward manifestations of that struggle.

That said...Things are, legitimately, very different today than they
were when Unix was young. The level of complexity has skyrocketed in
every dimension, and things have gotten to the point where hack upon
hack has congealed into a system that's nearly bursting at the seams.
It's honestly amazing that anything works at all.

That said, good things have been invented since 1985, and the way many
of us "grew up" thinking about problems doesn't always apply anymore.
The world changes; c'est la vie.

        - Dan C.

> ------- Original Message -------
> On Monday, February 27th, 2023 at 12:22 PM, arnold@skeeve.com <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Chet Ramey chet.ramey@case.edu wrote:
> >
> > > On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > >
> > > > IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the
> > > > almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
> > > > would be faster.
> > >
> > > Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web
> > > and barely understand, if at all.
> >
> >
> > Yeah, really.
> >
> > I do what I can, but it's a very steep uphill battle, as most
> > don't even understand that they're missing something, or that
> > they could learn it if they wanted to.
> >
> > I think I'll stop ranting before I really get going. :-)
> >
> > Arnold

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 21:01               ` segaloco via TUHS
@ 2023-02-27 21:15                 ` Chet Ramey
  2023-02-27 21:22                   ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Chet Ramey @ 2023-02-27 21:15 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: segaloco, Bakul Shah; +Cc: tuhs

On 2/27/23 4:01 PM, segaloco wrote:
> The official Rust book lists a blind script grab from a website piped into a shell as their "official" install mechanism.

Well, I suppose if it's from a trustworthy source...

(Sorry, my eyes rolled so hard they're bouncing on the floor right now.)

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 21:15                 ` Chet Ramey
@ 2023-02-27 21:22                   ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2023-02-27 21:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: chet.ramey; +Cc: segaloco, Bakul Shah, COFF

[COFF]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 4:16 PM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> On 2/27/23 4:01 PM, segaloco wrote:
> > The official Rust book lists a blind script grab from a website piped into a shell as their "official" install mechanism.
>
> Well, I suppose if it's from a trustworthy source...
>
> (Sorry, my eyes rolled so hard they're bouncing on the floor right now.)

I find this a little odd. If I go back to O'Reilly books from the
early 90s, there was advice to do all sorts of suspect things in them,
such as fetching random bits of pieces from random FTP servers (or
even using email fetch tarballs [!!]). Or downloading shell archives
from USENET.

And of course you _can_ download the script and read through it if you want.

And no one forces anyone to use `rustup`. Most vendors ship some
version of Rust through their package management system these days.

        - Dan C.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 20:56 ` Will Senn
@ 2023-02-27 22:14   ` Andru Luvisi
  2023-02-27 22:31   ` David Arnold
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Andru Luvisi @ 2023-02-27 22:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Will Senn; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4049 bytes --]

"A pain to configure" indeed!

I bought my first PC in '94 or '95 for the purpose of running Linux on it.

My roommate and I bought the exact same model, a no name custom build from
a local shop, so we could work with each other on figuring it out.

They did not have any video mode lines already written for our monitor
model, so we needed to construct them manually.

I remember spending hours with pencil and paper and calculator and the
manual for my monitor trying to create an adequate mode line.

And then, when you finally got something close enough to what the monitor
would support that you got an image, you had to keep tweaking the numbers
and restarting the X server in order to get the image appropriately sized
and centered, and avoid it wrapping around one of the edges.

Even all these years later, I still remember with deep fondness how elated
I was when I learned about xvidtune.

I also remember the excitement of finding a Windows tool that could
generate a mode line from the current video settings in Windows, but I
cannot remember the name or find it right now online.

This program is similar, but the initial release date is too late for it to
be the one I used.
https://www.geocities.ws/podernixie/htpc/modeline-en.html

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Andru



On Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 12:57 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> Paul,
> While the background information on X alternatives is interesting, I
> think there's some conflation going on. The distance in time between the
> linux kernel being posted and X being available on it was an eyeblink,
> even back then. There was no serious effort to look at other windowing
> systems in between "hey, what do y'all think of my new kernel - it runs
> gnu stuff" to "here it is with X and X apps".
>
> That said, it was a pain to configure, required just the right mix of
> video hardware and other hardware, and wasn't for the faint of heart. As
> X was becoming available on linux licketysplit, some folks either
> couldn't get it running or didn't have the hardware - those folks were
> probably the first to go looking at alternatives, but that didn't
> precede the x on linux effort.
>
> Will
>
> On 2/25/23 3:31 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> > I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all
> that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my
> wrist.
> >
> > Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and
> windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only
> discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that
> time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib
> was still around but already abandoned.
> >
> > By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the
> workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and
> pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early
> Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a
> different system than X would have made sense.
> >
> > In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for
> top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade
> before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early
> browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far
> as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with
> a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot
> find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
> >
> > So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list
> might remember:
> >
> > - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
> >
> > - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
> >
> > - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was
> appropriate?
> >
> >
>
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 20:56 ` Will Senn
  2023-02-27 22:14   ` Andru Luvisi
@ 2023-02-27 22:31   ` David Arnold
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: David Arnold @ 2023-02-27 22:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Will Senn; +Cc: tuhs

I think this has its roots in the goals for the system.

Linux was developed (let’s say, in the pre 2.x era) as a way to make the PCs that many people could afford into the workstation they couldn't.

There was very little effort to make Linux a better operating system, let alone a better Unix: it was “is it good enough to do what I can/could do on Solaris at work/college?”

And so, it moved through a pragmatic subset of V7/Minix to a rough POSIX/Solaris syscall interface, and grew an ecosystem of cobbled-together userland that enabled that goal.  For the vast majority of its users, X11 was a pre-requisite for serious use: there was more-or-less zero impetus for a competing UI.  Perhaps the closest thing to it was GNUstep, which to this day, limps along with very little use (and is implemented over X11 anyway).

Look at how drawn-out the adoption of Wayland has been as evidence of how little interest there has been in alternative graphical models.

None of that is a bad thing, per se — give me Ubuntu 23.04 over Solaris 2.4 (or even 11) any day: mostly libre, mostly gratis, cheap hardware, and it just works.



d

> On 28 Feb 2023, at 07:56, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Paul,
> While the background information on X alternatives is interesting, I think there's some conflation going on. The distance in time between the linux kernel being posted and X being available on it was an eyeblink, even back then. There was no serious effort to look at other windowing systems in between "hey, what do y'all think of my new kernel - it runs gnu stuff" to "here it is with X and X apps".
> 
> That said, it was a pain to configure, required just the right mix of video hardware and other hardware, and wasn't for the faint of heart. As X was becoming available on linux licketysplit, some folks either couldn't get it running or didn't have the hardware - those folks were probably the first to go looking at alternatives, but that didn't precede the x on linux effort.
> 
> Will
> 
> On 2/25/23 3:31 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
>> 
>> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
>> 
>> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
>> 
>> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>> 
>> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
>> 
>> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
>> 
>> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>> 
>> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?
>> 
>> 
> 


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
                       ` (3 preceding siblings ...)
  2023-02-27 20:30     ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Dan Cross
@ 2023-02-28  1:08     ` Jonathan Gray
  2023-02-28  1:15       ` Clem Cole
  4 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Jonathan Gray @ 2023-02-28  1:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 06:22:09PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote:
> 
> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
> 
> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer. It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.
> 
> This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense.
> 
> ===
> 
> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.
> 
> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?

When did Interleaf and Framemaker have X based versions?

"Framemaker was the main application everybody would run to prove that
their X box actually worked"
Andrew McRae - Sun, Surf and X in California
AUUGN, Volume 10, Number 4, August 1989
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V10.4.pdf

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 20:30     ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Dan Cross
@ 2023-02-28  1:10       ` Alexis
  2023-02-28  1:27         ` Dan Cross
  2023-03-01 16:39       ` Paul Ruizendaal
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Alexis @ 2023-02-28  1:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs


Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> writes:

> There
> was a fractal viewer that I thought was fun, but I don't 
> remember it
> much anymore (even the name...)

My guess is that it was probably 'xaos'? Certainly i had fun with 
it:

  https://xaos-project.github.io/

(My first Unix-like system was RedHat 5.2 'Apollo', in the late 
90s.)


Alexis.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-28  1:08     ` Jonathan Gray
@ 2023-02-28  1:15       ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2023-02-28  1:15 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Jonathan Gray; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, tuhs

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I believe Ken Keller wrote the original framemaker using X10 - (maybe 11
but I thought it was 10) running on a Sun3 -  I’ll try ask him.   He was
trying to keep it systems independent and at the time X was the most
promising way to do that.

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 8:09 PM Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 06:22:09PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote:
> >
> > Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
> >
> > What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because
> what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
> It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it
> matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a
> generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days
> in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple
> terminals.
> >
> > This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The
> earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix
> from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top
> level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas,
> with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of
> sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the
> Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2.
> In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes
> sense.
> >
> > ===
> >
> > It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of
> the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis
> on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design
> elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for
> technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the
> Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer
> demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.
> >
> > It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear
> for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator,
> etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix
> seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?
>
> When did Interleaf and Framemaker have X based versions?
>
> "Framemaker was the main application everybody would run to prove that
> their X box actually worked"
> Andrew McRae - Sun, Surf and X in California
> AUUGN, Volume 10, Number 4, August 1989
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V10.4.pdf
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-28  1:10       ` Alexis
@ 2023-02-28  1:27         ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2023-02-28  1:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Alexis; +Cc: tuhs

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 8:14 PM Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> writes:
> > There
> > was a fractal viewer that I thought was fun, but I don't
> > remember it
> > much anymore (even the name...)
>
> My guess is that it was probably 'xaos'? Certainly i had fun with
> it:
>
>   https://xaos-project.github.io/

I believe that's it. Thanks, Alexis!

        - Dan C.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-26  5:24   ` John Cowan
  2023-02-26  5:36     ` Steve Nickolas
@ 2023-02-28  3:35     ` Dave Horsfall
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2023-02-28  3:35 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Sun, 26 Feb 2023, John Cowan wrote:

> However, most configuration errors can't reduce your hardware to a 
> useless pile of junk, whereas older CRT monitors could definitely be 
> destroyed if the configuration was too far off nominal.

Not to mention MS-DOS malware that used to set the horizontal deflection 
rate really high and creating massive inductive spikes, or the vertical 
deflection to zero and burning out the phosphor...

-- Dave

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-27 20:46           ` segaloco via TUHS
  2023-02-27 21:04             ` Dan Cross
@ 2023-02-28  7:59             ` arnold
  2023-02-28 15:28               ` Clem Cole
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: arnold @ 2023-02-28  7:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: segaloco, arnold; +Cc: tuhs

As Dan said, this is nuanced.

While I'm sure there's lots of mediocre programmers writing mediocre code,
(a) there probably always has been [think COBOL on mainframes] and (b)
it is not universal. I have generally been fortunate to find interesting
and challenging work in a fairly long career; there's lots of interesting
problems out there that need solving which can't be dealt with by just
stringing together existing class libraries using an IDE on autopilot.
You have to look for it, and then hope you're qualified enough that they'll
hire you.

HTH,

Arnold

segaloco <segaloco@protonmail.com> wrote:

> I see the wisdom in your last line there, I've typed and deleted a
> response to this email 4 times, each one more convoluted than the last.
> 
> The short of my stance though is, as a younger programmer (29),
> I am certainly not a fan of these trends that are all too common in
> my generation.  That said, I've set foot in one single softare-related
> class in my life (highschool Java class) and so I don't really know
> what is being taught to folks going the traditional routes.  All I
> know from my one abortive semester of college is that I didn't see a
> whole lot of reliance on individual exploration of concepts in classes,
> just everyone working to a one-size-fits-all understanding of how to
> be a good employee in a given subject area.  Of course, this is also
> influenced by my philosophy and biases and such, and only represents 4-5
> months of observation, but if my minimal experience with college is to be
> believed, I have little faith that educational programs are producing
> much more than meat filters between StackOverflow and <insert code
> editor here>.  No offense to said meat filters, people gotta work, but
> there is something lost when the constant march of production torpedoes
> individual creativity.  Then again, do big firms want sophisticated
> engineers or are we too far gone into assembly line programming with no
> personal connection to any of the products?  I'm glad I'm as personally
> involved in the stuff I work with, I could see myself slipping into the
> same patterns of apathy if I was a nameless face in a sea of coders on
> some project I don't even know the legal name of any given day.
>
> - Matt G.
>
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Monday, February 27th, 2023 at 12:22 PM, arnold@skeeve.com <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Chet Ramey chet.ramey@case.edu wrote:
> > 
> > > On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > 
> > > > IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the
> > > > almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
> > > > would be faster.
> > > 
> > > Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web
> > > and barely understand, if at all.
> > 
> > 
> > Yeah, really.
> > 
> > I do what I can, but it's a very steep uphill battle, as most
> > don't even understand that they're missing something, or that
> > they could learn it if they wanted to.
> > 
> > I think I'll stop ranting before I really get going. :-)
> > 
> > Arnold

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
  2023-02-28  7:59             ` arnold
@ 2023-02-28 15:28               ` Clem Cole
       [not found]                 ` <CAP2nic1STmWn5YTrnvFbexwwfYWT=pD28gXpVS1CVSfOOwxx7g@mail.gmail.com>
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2023-02-28 15:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: arnold; +Cc: segaloco, tuhs

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On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 3:00 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> As Dan said, this is nuanced.
>
That is so true  - I suspect it is a multi-edged sword, probably more than
two edges.

>
> While I'm sure there's lots of mediocre programmers writing mediocre code,
> (a) there probably always has been [think COBOL on mainframes] and (b) it
> is not universal.

Sure. CS students are still not getting introduced to FORTRAN even though
over 90% of all production supercomputer code uses it. Again I don't
program it, but I accept that modern Fortran is not a terrible language -
because I looked at it and know a bit about it (I'm not too snooty
to do so).  So modern FORTRAN courses are now taught in science departments
and passed from professor to student (and it paid my salary as long as I
made systems that ran it well).  My 30 yr CS major daughter, who has
been at Google for a few years, never saw FORTRAN (or Snobol - much less
awk/sed) in her comparative languages course. I think that's a sin.   She's
fluent in Python and Java - as well as a ton of tools for 'cloud
development and deployment.'  Clearly these are valuable skills and the way
a lot of modern programs are deployed.   She can work with C++ and Go (and
I think Rust) and saw a dialect of LISP (racket) in her
comparative languages course. In her university time, they taught they all
about regular expressions and made her and her classmates all use
grep/awk/sed in her original algorithms course years ago.



> I have generally been fortunate to find interesting
> and challenging work in a fairly long career; there's lots of interesting
> problems out there that need solving which can't be dealt with by just
> stringing together existing class libraries using an IDE on autopilot.
> You have to look for it, and then hope you're qualified enough that they'll
> hire you.
>
Exactly.

However, the cool things that we are yet to see will be created by Matt and
my daughter's generation, and I'm sure they will be great and *just as
important in the long run* as some of the neat things a few of us on this
list created. As Dan said, CS did not stop in 1989. Dennis said it well: *“From
an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly
old stuff, and it’s clear that people should be looking beyond it.”*

The important thing is not to reject something just because it is old and
jump to something because it's new.   I find the current
class-library/frameworks cruft as bad (and not a lot different from) the
'access methods' that IBM created in the 1960s, and Multics and UNIX boldly
rejected with all the worlds a 'segment' or later file.

This is the importance of teaching and exposing students to ideas (good and
bad) from the past so as not to repeat them. BTW: just because an idea
failed previously does not mean it will not work later or that such an
idea is a good or bad one now.  This is why experience is so important -
for a >>great read<< Peter Novigs  Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
<https://streaklinks.com/BaVcbV1trZMtU5LmFQEiYZUD/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.norvig.com%2F21-days.html>

I often refer to this as picking up 'good taste.'   I agree with Arnold
that learning an IDE often seems like you are losing the ability to have a
foundation.   I've pointed out reading >>and doing the exercises<< in Rob
and Brian's excellent text: The Unix Programming Environment
<https://streaklinks.com/BaVcbV1WlnjOWWT1lgopkCVD/https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThe_Unix_Programming_Environment>
really
should be part of all young programmers' experience (even learning to use a
document compiler like the runoff family. Once you master ed, regular
expressions and the like make you a better programmer.        I'm not
saying you must be fluent/use vi or emacs as your primary editor to be a
great programmer. Still, I would place a large bet that the best
programmers all know how to use at least one of those tools - and I'll also
bet that they all could use a QED-derived line editor if that is what was
available.

The key to the UNIX philosophy is teaching to think *vs.* spoon-feeding a
current answer.

Sometimes, the latter has its place (I use many GUI-based applications on
my mac), but I always have several 'iterm2' windows open with a shell
prompt. The problem is that when the former is all you know, your only real
experience, I think people that have a wider field of view and a more open
mind are going to understand that your experience is quite limited and thus
the ability to judge the good/bad-ness of a something might be a tad
suspect.

Curmudgeon-ly yours,
Clem

ᐧ
ᐧ

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* [TUHS] Fwd: Re: Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux]
       [not found]                 ` <CAP2nic1STmWn5YTrnvFbexwwfYWT=pD28gXpVS1CVSfOOwxx7g@mail.gmail.com>
@ 2023-02-28 15:50                   ` Adam Thornton
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Adam Thornton @ 2023-02-28 15:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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And, you know, let's say you have all the time and patience in the world
and you download the source and read it carefully and determine it's not
malicious...

I believe there might have been a lecture/paper about this once.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

(I can just hear them damn kids standing on my lawn chanting "You can't
spell 'trust' without 'rust'!")

I keep trying to give VSCode a go.  It seems really nifty.  And somehow I
keep bouncing off and landing in Emacs, every time.  Maybe when I finally
get around to writing, rather than cargo-culting TypeScript, or Unity/C#,
it'll be a better fit.  But for my current life, which is mostly Python...I
appear to be sticking with Emacs.

Adam

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-02-27 20:30     ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Dan Cross
  2023-02-28  1:10       ` Alexis
@ 2023-03-01 16:39       ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-03-01 16:54         ` Larry McVoy
                           ` (2 more replies)
  1 sibling, 3 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal @ 2023-03-01 16:39 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Thank you for highlighting that!

Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.

This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.


> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
>> 
>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
> 
> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
> used regularly.
> 
> Some I remember where `gv` to look at PostScript documents, `xv` to
> view image files, `gnuplot` could generate plots in a window, `xdvi`
> to look at TeX/LaTeX output, and text editors like `emacs` had X
> front-ends that offered syntax highlighting and the like; some folks I
> knew liked `nedit`. `exmh` was my preferred email client for a while,
> and things like `xman` (was there a `tkman`, too?) was nice. Some
> system monitoring tools `xload` were considered essentials; `xbiff`
> could be useful (I could have sworn there was a `tkbiff`, too). A
> clock like `xclock` or `oclock` or something was also nice. Some folks
> liked graphical newsreaders, chat programs (I guess IRC was a thing
> back then, and I believe some `talk` client had an X front-end). There
> was a fractal viewer that I thought was fun, but I don't remember it
> much anymore (even the name...). Oh, and lots of games; I had a nice
> Solitaire version that I can no longer recall the name of. `xeyes` was
> cute, and running `xroach` was a popular (?) prank for an unsuspecting
> (but amenable) colleague.
> 
> A lot of us spent a lot of time customizing our environments, and many
> eschewed the vendor-standard environment. For instance, a lot of
> people I knew used `twm` and derivatives (`ctwm` and `tvtwm` were
> popular), and spent a lot of time tweaking menus and stuff to set
> things up the way we liked. A lot of folks also wrote custom tools
> using `tk` or `expectk`. Giving all of that up to run on Linux was a
> bitter pill to swallow, so there was a real impetus to get X running
> quickly. Personally, I kept my `tvtwm`-based environment going until I
> switched to plan9 and then to the Mac as a daily driver. I'm not sure
> I miss it, but at the time it was head-and-shoulders above anything
> you could get on Windows or (classic) MacOS.
> 
> So it wasn't just that people wanted a "familiar terminal multiplexor"
> as that people wanted the environments they had put a lot of time and
> energy into building up for themselves, and again, that often meant X.
> 
>> It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.
> 
> I think it probably depends on what people are doing. I more or less
> switched to using VS Code for my editor, and I'm using a Mac Studio to
> write this, but my desktop is still littered with terminal windows,
> I've got a `drawterm` session open to my local Plan 9 network, and am
> logged into a bunch of old systems (Multics, TOPS-20, VMS, an IBM
> mainframe, CDC Cyber, RSTS/E, PR1ME), etc.
> 
> But the way we write software has changed pretty dramatically in the
> last 3 or so decades. I used to start with an empty C file and write
> my stuff. Things like linked-lists? Mostly implemented by hand. These
> days, there are other languages and vast collections of libraries for
> almost anything imaginable; much of what "programming" is today is
> glueing together different libraries and making them interact in
> sophisticated, often quite complex ways. I don't know that it's
> better, nor that it's always worse, but it is qualitatively different.
> So almost necessarily the toolsets and environment have changed
> accordingly.
> 
>> This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense.
> 
> It may be instructive to look at the early X window managers in this
> regard.  One I remember was `uwm` (I think); I recall being struck
> that it reminded me of rio when I saw it.
> 
>> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.
> 
> I remember the X mantra was, "mechanism, not policy." Which was fine,
> except that there wasn't much of even a default policy, which made X
> (IMHO) a bit of a bear to program and meant that interfaces were
> pretty wildly inconsistent across programs. By contrast, writing
> simple programs to draw lines on the Mac was easy.
> 
> Interestingly, frustration with this caused an almost cambrian
> explosion of new windowing environments within a few years of Linux's
> arrival on the scene. From larger efforts like Gtk (and then GNOME),
> KDE, GNUStep (which I guess might predate Linux, but not by much...),
> etc, to less ambitious things components like fvwm and Enlightenment,
> we kind of went from "OpenWindows or Motif or roll your own stuff
> around twm or something" to a whole plethora of things. It's still a
> bit of a mess, though.
> 
>> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?
> 
> Lots!  See above.
> 
>        - Dan C.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-03-01 16:39       ` Paul Ruizendaal
@ 2023-03-01 16:54         ` Larry McVoy
  2023-03-01 17:22           ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-03-01 18:59         ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Theodore Ts'o
  2023-03-02  7:27         ` arnold
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2023-03-01 16:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

It's worth pointing out that X had won before Linux.  I was a contractor
in 1987, worked on all sorts of different workstations with all sorts of
vendor provided window systems, and the first thing I did was to bring
up my trusty X10R3 tape.  

The vendor windowing systems were all oh-so-great (according to the
vendors) but as a contractor, I could have cared less.  I wanted my
dev enviroment so I could get work done, learning the ins and outs of
$VENDOR's $WINDOW_SYSTEM was just a waste of my time, I'd be done and
on to the next job and all that specific knowledge was a waste of effort.

All of that predated my exposure to Linux (which was early, way before
Linux had networking or distributions, I brought it up from floppies).

As a useful (to me) aside, I got very good at what I call "pruning the
tree" when bringing up X10.  There were a ton of #ifdefs and (even then)
quite a few frame buffer drivers and there was no way I could have brought
it up in any reasonable time if I tracked down the root cause of each
reason it wouldn't compile.  So I got good at looking at the source,
going, huh, I don't need this and changing stuff like

int whatever_function_that_I_did_not_need(<args)
{
	/* lots of code that wouldn't compile */
}

to

int whatever_function_that_I_did_not_need(<args)
{
#if 0
	/* lots of code that wouldn't compile */
#else
	return (0);	/* or whatever meant success for that function */
#endif
}

I had very little actual understanding of the code, just barely enough to
guess that I didn't need something.  So it was way quicker to ifdef it
out and keep moving.

That skill has served me well over the years, you don't need deep
understanding to know you don't need $FEATURE.

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> Thank you for highlighting that!
> 
> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
> 
> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
> 
> 
> > On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
> >> 
> >> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
> > 
> > While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
> > I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
> > Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
> > workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
> > used regularly.
> > 
> > Some I remember where `gv` to look at PostScript documents, `xv` to
> > view image files, `gnuplot` could generate plots in a window, `xdvi`
> > to look at TeX/LaTeX output, and text editors like `emacs` had X
> > front-ends that offered syntax highlighting and the like; some folks I
> > knew liked `nedit`. `exmh` was my preferred email client for a while,
> > and things like `xman` (was there a `tkman`, too?) was nice. Some
> > system monitoring tools `xload` were considered essentials; `xbiff`
> > could be useful (I could have sworn there was a `tkbiff`, too). A
> > clock like `xclock` or `oclock` or something was also nice. Some folks
> > liked graphical newsreaders, chat programs (I guess IRC was a thing
> > back then, and I believe some `talk` client had an X front-end). There
> > was a fractal viewer that I thought was fun, but I don't remember it
> > much anymore (even the name...). Oh, and lots of games; I had a nice
> > Solitaire version that I can no longer recall the name of. `xeyes` was
> > cute, and running `xroach` was a popular (?) prank for an unsuspecting
> > (but amenable) colleague.
> > 
> > A lot of us spent a lot of time customizing our environments, and many
> > eschewed the vendor-standard environment. For instance, a lot of
> > people I knew used `twm` and derivatives (`ctwm` and `tvtwm` were
> > popular), and spent a lot of time tweaking menus and stuff to set
> > things up the way we liked. A lot of folks also wrote custom tools
> > using `tk` or `expectk`. Giving all of that up to run on Linux was a
> > bitter pill to swallow, so there was a real impetus to get X running
> > quickly. Personally, I kept my `tvtwm`-based environment going until I
> > switched to plan9 and then to the Mac as a daily driver. I'm not sure
> > I miss it, but at the time it was head-and-shoulders above anything
> > you could get on Windows or (classic) MacOS.
> > 
> > So it wasn't just that people wanted a "familiar terminal multiplexor"
> > as that people wanted the environments they had put a lot of time and
> > energy into building up for themselves, and again, that often meant X.
> > 
> >> It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today???s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.
> > 
> > I think it probably depends on what people are doing. I more or less
> > switched to using VS Code for my editor, and I'm using a Mac Studio to
> > write this, but my desktop is still littered with terminal windows,
> > I've got a `drawterm` session open to my local Plan 9 network, and am
> > logged into a bunch of old systems (Multics, TOPS-20, VMS, an IBM
> > mainframe, CDC Cyber, RSTS/E, PR1ME), etc.
> > 
> > But the way we write software has changed pretty dramatically in the
> > last 3 or so decades. I used to start with an empty C file and write
> > my stuff. Things like linked-lists? Mostly implemented by hand. These
> > days, there are other languages and vast collections of libraries for
> > almost anything imaginable; much of what "programming" is today is
> > glueing together different libraries and making them interact in
> > sophisticated, often quite complex ways. I don't know that it's
> > better, nor that it's always worse, but it is qualitatively different.
> > So almost necessarily the toolsets and environment have changed
> > accordingly.
> > 
> >> This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense.
> > 
> > It may be instructive to look at the early X window managers in this
> > regard.  One I remember was `uwm` (I think); I recall being struck
> > that it reminded me of rio when I saw it.
> > 
> >> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.
> > 
> > I remember the X mantra was, "mechanism, not policy." Which was fine,
> > except that there wasn't much of even a default policy, which made X
> > (IMHO) a bit of a bear to program and meant that interfaces were
> > pretty wildly inconsistent across programs. By contrast, writing
> > simple programs to draw lines on the Mac was easy.
> > 
> > Interestingly, frustration with this caused an almost cambrian
> > explosion of new windowing environments within a few years of Linux's
> > arrival on the scene. From larger efforts like Gtk (and then GNOME),
> > KDE, GNUStep (which I guess might predate Linux, but not by much...),
> > etc, to less ambitious things components like fvwm and Enlightenment,
> > we kind of went from "OpenWindows or Motif or roll your own stuff
> > around twm or something" to a whole plethora of things. It's still a
> > bit of a mess, though.
> > 
> >> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?
> > 
> > Lots!  See above.
> > 
> >        - Dan C.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-03-01 16:54         ` Larry McVoy
@ 2023-03-01 17:22           ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-03-01 17:52             ` Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal @ 2023-03-01 17:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs, Larry McVoy

That is very quick. X10R3 came out in Feb 1986 (which I understand was the first ‘outside' release) and by 1987 it was already the dominant windowing system? Or did you mean that it had won prior to 1991?


> On 1 Mar 2023, at 17:54, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> It's worth pointing out that X had won before Linux.  I was a contractor
> in 1987, worked on all sorts of different workstations with all sorts of
> vendor provided window systems, and the first thing I did was to bring
> up my trusty X10R3 tape.

> On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>> Thank you for highlighting that!
>> 
>> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
>> 
>> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
>> 
>> 
>>> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>>>> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
>>>> 
>>>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
>>> 
>>> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
>>> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
>>> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
>>> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
>>> used regularly.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-03-01 17:22           ` Paul Ruizendaal
@ 2023-03-01 17:52             ` Larry McVoy
  2023-03-02  1:17               ` Jonathan Gray
  2023-03-02  4:28               ` Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2023-03-01 17:52 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

It was the answer for me, I wanted "sameness" across platforms (which was
what Unix was advertising and then the vendors all diverged into their
"value add").

I can't believe that 1987 was my first exposure to bringing up X, pretty
sure I had done it at UW-Madison for the same reasons.  But maybe not,
I dunno, it was a long time ago.

All I know is that, at the time, X10R3 was the only hope I had of getting
the same dev environment no matter what I was working on.

Whether I had brought it up or not at UW-Madison, I had been using some
version of X for years, at least 5 years and probably more, prior to
going out in industry in 1987.  And that wasn't my doing, UW-Madison
was very much a hackers school, a good one, and they had X-something
running on everything, micro vaxen, RTs, Suns, everything.

So it wasn't like 1987 happened and I "picked" X over some alternative,
it was already the answer well before that, years and years before that.
I know I was running it as an undergrad.

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 06:22:49PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> That is very quick. X10R3 came out in Feb 1986 (which I understand was the first ???outside' release) and by 1987 it was already the dominant windowing system? Or did you mean that it had won prior to 1991?
> 
> 
> > On 1 Mar 2023, at 17:54, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > It's worth pointing out that X had won before Linux.  I was a contractor
> > in 1987, worked on all sorts of different workstations with all sorts of
> > vendor provided window systems, and the first thing I did was to bring
> > up my trusty X10R3 tape.
> 
> > On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> >> Thank you for highlighting that!
> >> 
> >> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
> >> 
> >> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
> >> 
> >> 
> >>> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >>>> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
> >>>> 
> >>>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
> >>> 
> >>> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
> >>> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
> >>> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
> >>> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
> >>> used regularly.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-03-01 16:39       ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-03-01 16:54         ` Larry McVoy
@ 2023-03-01 18:59         ` Theodore Ts'o
  2023-03-02  7:27         ` arnold
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Theodore Ts'o @ 2023-03-01 18:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> 
> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it
> provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did
> not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already
> important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very
> early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X
> applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were
> more appreciated than I thought.

One of the critical applications that a lot of us needed were being
able to view postscript and dvi files.  Sure, in the Unix days you
could take a 'roff file and typeset it using either troff/ditroff or
nroff, but if you are downloading a paper which was published as a
postscript file, or you are authoring your problem set for a MIT math
class (where the recitation instructor was too lazy to create their
own answer sheet, so students competed to have their problem sets to
be reproduced as the official answer sheet for that problem set, so
some of us took to typesetting our weekly problem sets using TeX or
LaTeX), you really want a graphical windowing system.

> > It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to
> > appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal,
> > clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one
> > (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around
> > 1995. Anything broadly used before that?

I was typesetting problem sets using xdvi as early as 1987-1988; using
the IBM PC/RT as well as VAXstations as an undergraduate.

So if it was just xterm and emacs, maybe you could use alternatives
like screen, tmux, mgr, etc.  But as Larry and Dan have said, what
folks wanted was a home Unix "workstation", and by the late 80's, X
Windows had clearly won, having dominated alternatives like Sun's NeWS
and NeXTSTEP.

					- Ted

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-03-01 17:52             ` Larry McVoy
@ 2023-03-02  1:17               ` Jonathan Gray
  2023-03-02  4:28               ` Larry McVoy
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Jonathan Gray @ 2023-03-02  1:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, tuhs

X10R3 was also included in the 4.3BSD tape

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/contrib/X

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 09:52:32AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> It was the answer for me, I wanted "sameness" across platforms (which was
> what Unix was advertising and then the vendors all diverged into their
> "value add").
> 
> I can't believe that 1987 was my first exposure to bringing up X, pretty
> sure I had done it at UW-Madison for the same reasons.  But maybe not,
> I dunno, it was a long time ago.
> 
> All I know is that, at the time, X10R3 was the only hope I had of getting
> the same dev environment no matter what I was working on.
> 
> Whether I had brought it up or not at UW-Madison, I had been using some
> version of X for years, at least 5 years and probably more, prior to
> going out in industry in 1987.  And that wasn't my doing, UW-Madison
> was very much a hackers school, a good one, and they had X-something
> running on everything, micro vaxen, RTs, Suns, everything.
> 
> So it wasn't like 1987 happened and I "picked" X over some alternative,
> it was already the answer well before that, years and years before that.
> I know I was running it as an undergrad.
> 
> On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 06:22:49PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> > That is very quick. X10R3 came out in Feb 1986 (which I understand was the first ???outside' release) and by 1987 it was already the dominant windowing system? Or did you mean that it had won prior to 1991?
> > 
> > 
> > > On 1 Mar 2023, at 17:54, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > It's worth pointing out that X had won before Linux.  I was a contractor
> > > in 1987, worked on all sorts of different workstations with all sorts of
> > > vendor provided window systems, and the first thing I did was to bring
> > > up my trusty X10R3 tape.
> > 
> > > On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> > >> Thank you for highlighting that!
> > >> 
> > >> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
> > >> 
> > >> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
> > >> 
> > >> 
> > >>> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>> 
> > >>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> > >>>> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
> > >>>> 
> > >>>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
> > >>> 
> > >>> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
> > >>> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
> > >>> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
> > >>> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
> > >>> used regularly.
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
> 

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-03-01 17:52             ` Larry McVoy
  2023-03-02  1:17               ` Jonathan Gray
@ 2023-03-02  4:28               ` Larry McVoy
  2023-03-02  6:46                 ` [TUHS] X timeline Lars Brinkhoff
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 57+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2023-03-02  4:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Ruizendaal; +Cc: tuhs

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 09:52:32AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Whether I had brought it up or not at UW-Madison, I had been using some
> version of X for years, at least 5 years and probably more, prior to
> going out in industry in 1987.  And that wasn't my doing, UW-Madison
> was very much a hackers school, a good one, and they had X-something
> running on everything, micro vaxen, RTs, Suns, everything.

Paul gently took me to task in private and pointed out that my timeline
doesn't make sense, there is no way I was running X anything in 1982.
And he's right, there were a number of years on vt52 and vt100 and
whatever was the heath one, I loved that terminal because you could code
it to put status in the 25th line.  A lot of time on terminals connected
to a Vax 780.

I was an undergrad from 1980-85, grad in 96 and 87.  I'm pretty sure
I was running some version of X as an undergrad, probably as a senior.

But not for 5 years before I graduated as I said so my bad.  I'm a
fisherman, the fish get bigger every time I tell the story and the years
I used X back in the day get longer :)

Whatever the details are, I left Wisconsin with X as my dev environment
and I believe I brought it up on Suns, HPs, SGIs, Linux of course,
maybe SCO (I might have skipped that and just used console ttys, the
SCO I used was warmed over V7) and who knows what else.

X was to me in windowing as Unix was to me in operating systems, they were
what I wanted simply because I got more work done in those environments.

--lm

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] X timeline
  2023-03-02  4:28               ` Larry McVoy
@ 2023-03-02  6:46                 ` Lars Brinkhoff
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: Lars Brinkhoff @ 2023-03-02  6:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: Paul Ruizendaal, tuhs

Larry McVoy wrote:
> Paul gently took me to task in private and pointed out that my timeline
> doesn't make sense, there is no way I was running X anything in 1982.

I recently collected some information about the X timeline:

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/absolutely-not-a-vaxstation100-emulator/issues/1

Corrections welcome.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
  2023-03-01 16:39       ` Paul Ruizendaal
  2023-03-01 16:54         ` Larry McVoy
  2023-03-01 18:59         ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Theodore Ts'o
@ 2023-03-02  7:27         ` arnold
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 57+ messages in thread
From: arnold @ 2023-03-02  7:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs, pnr

I will say that if you didn't care about lots of apps or your windowm manager
tweeks, MGR was great. I ran it on a small sparcstation for a while in the
early 90s, and it was M U C H faster than X on the same hardware.

Arnold

Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:

> Thank you for highlighting that!
>
> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
>
> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
>
>
> > On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
> >> 
> >> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
> > 
> > While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
> > I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
> > Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
> > workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
> > used regularly.
> > 
> > Some I remember where `gv` to look at PostScript documents, `xv` to
> > view image files, `gnuplot` could generate plots in a window, `xdvi`
> > to look at TeX/LaTeX output, and text editors like `emacs` had X
> > front-ends that offered syntax highlighting and the like; some folks I
> > knew liked `nedit`. `exmh` was my preferred email client for a while,
> > and things like `xman` (was there a `tkman`, too?) was nice. Some
> > system monitoring tools `xload` were considered essentials; `xbiff`
> > could be useful (I could have sworn there was a `tkbiff`, too). A
> > clock like `xclock` or `oclock` or something was also nice. Some folks
> > liked graphical newsreaders, chat programs (I guess IRC was a thing
> > back then, and I believe some `talk` client had an X front-end). There
> > was a fractal viewer that I thought was fun, but I don't remember it
> > much anymore (even the name...). Oh, and lots of games; I had a nice
> > Solitaire version that I can no longer recall the name of. `xeyes` was
> > cute, and running `xroach` was a popular (?) prank for an unsuspecting
> > (but amenable) colleague.
> > 
> > A lot of us spent a lot of time customizing our environments, and many
> > eschewed the vendor-standard environment. For instance, a lot of
> > people I knew used `twm` and derivatives (`ctwm` and `tvtwm` were
> > popular), and spent a lot of time tweaking menus and stuff to set
> > things up the way we liked. A lot of folks also wrote custom tools
> > using `tk` or `expectk`. Giving all of that up to run on Linux was a
> > bitter pill to swallow, so there was a real impetus to get X running
> > quickly. Personally, I kept my `tvtwm`-based environment going until I
> > switched to plan9 and then to the Mac as a daily driver. I'm not sure
> > I miss it, but at the time it was head-and-shoulders above anything
> > you could get on Windows or (classic) MacOS.
> > 
> > So it wasn't just that people wanted a "familiar terminal multiplexor"
> > as that people wanted the environments they had put a lot of time and
> > energy into building up for themselves, and again, that often meant X.
> > 
> >> It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.
> > 
> > I think it probably depends on what people are doing. I more or less
> > switched to using VS Code for my editor, and I'm using a Mac Studio to
> > write this, but my desktop is still littered with terminal windows,
> > I've got a `drawterm` session open to my local Plan 9 network, and am
> > logged into a bunch of old systems (Multics, TOPS-20, VMS, an IBM
> > mainframe, CDC Cyber, RSTS/E, PR1ME), etc.
> > 
> > But the way we write software has changed pretty dramatically in the
> > last 3 or so decades. I used to start with an empty C file and write
> > my stuff. Things like linked-lists? Mostly implemented by hand. These
> > days, there are other languages and vast collections of libraries for
> > almost anything imaginable; much of what "programming" is today is
> > glueing together different libraries and making them interact in
> > sophisticated, often quite complex ways. I don't know that it's
> > better, nor that it's always worse, but it is qualitatively different.
> > So almost necessarily the toolsets and environment have changed
> > accordingly.
> > 
> >> This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense.
> > 
> > It may be instructive to look at the early X window managers in this
> > regard.  One I remember was `uwm` (I think); I recall being struck
> > that it reminded me of rio when I saw it.
> > 
> >> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.
> > 
> > I remember the X mantra was, "mechanism, not policy." Which was fine,
> > except that there wasn't much of even a default policy, which made X
> > (IMHO) a bit of a bear to program and meant that interfaces were
> > pretty wildly inconsistent across programs. By contrast, writing
> > simple programs to draw lines on the Mac was easy.
> > 
> > Interestingly, frustration with this caused an almost cambrian
> > explosion of new windowing environments within a few years of Linux's
> > arrival on the scene. From larger efforts like Gtk (and then GNOME),
> > KDE, GNUStep (which I guess might predate Linux, but not by much...),
> > etc, to less ambitious things components like fvwm and Enlightenment,
> > we kind of went from "OpenWindows or Motif or roll your own stuff
> > around twm or something" to a whole plethora of things. It's still a
> > bit of a mess, though.
> > 
> >> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?
> > 
> > Lots!  See above.
> > 
> >        - Dan C.
>


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 57+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2023-03-02  7:28 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 57+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] Early GUI on Linux Paul Ruizendaal
2023-02-25 22:49 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
2023-02-26  1:27   ` Larry McVoy
2023-02-26  0:39 ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26  1:14   ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-02-26 15:50   ` Leah Neukirchen
2023-02-26 16:13     ` Larry McVoy
2023-02-26 16:23       ` Leah Neukirchen
2023-02-26 16:32         ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26 16:39         ` Will Senn
2023-02-26 19:58       ` Dave Horsfall
2023-02-27  0:16         ` Adam Thornton
2023-02-27 10:09       ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-02-26  2:21 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-02-27 18:32     ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26  2:27 ` Will Senn
2023-02-26  2:30 ` Will Senn
2023-02-26  2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
2023-02-26  3:28   ` Dan Cross
2023-02-26  3:45     ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26  5:24   ` John Cowan
2023-02-26  5:36     ` Steve Nickolas
2023-02-28  3:35     ` Dave Horsfall
2023-02-27 17:22   ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2023-02-27 17:59     ` Arno Griffioen via TUHS
2023-02-27 18:07     ` Warner Losh
2023-02-27 20:04     ` [TUHS] Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux] arnold
2023-02-27 20:08       ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
2023-02-27 20:22         ` arnold
2023-02-27 20:46           ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-02-27 21:04             ` Dan Cross
2023-02-28  7:59             ` arnold
2023-02-28 15:28               ` Clem Cole
     [not found]                 ` <CAP2nic1STmWn5YTrnvFbexwwfYWT=pD28gXpVS1CVSfOOwxx7g@mail.gmail.com>
2023-02-28 15:50                   ` [TUHS] Fwd: " Adam Thornton
2023-02-27 20:50           ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
2023-02-27 20:55             ` Bakul Shah
2023-02-27 21:01               ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-02-27 21:15                 ` Chet Ramey
2023-02-27 21:22                   ` Dan Cross
2023-02-27 20:30     ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Dan Cross
2023-02-28  1:10       ` Alexis
2023-02-28  1:27         ` Dan Cross
2023-03-01 16:39       ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-03-01 16:54         ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-01 17:22           ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-03-01 17:52             ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-02  1:17               ` Jonathan Gray
2023-03-02  4:28               ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-02  6:46                 ` [TUHS] X timeline Lars Brinkhoff
2023-03-01 18:59         ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Theodore Ts'o
2023-03-02  7:27         ` arnold
2023-02-28  1:08     ` Jonathan Gray
2023-02-28  1:15       ` Clem Cole
2023-02-27 20:56 ` Will Senn
2023-02-27 22:14   ` Andru Luvisi
2023-02-27 22:31   ` David Arnold

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