28 Feb
2023
28 Feb
'23
2:15 a.m.
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(a)jsg.id.au> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 06:22:09PM +0100, Paul
Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote:
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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