Xerox Star User Interface (1982) 2 of 2

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DonHopkins · 2022-01 · Reference

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

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pjmlp · 2017-02 · Reference

Faire enough, so prepare for an history lesson. :) Mesa/Cedar was created at Xerox PARC, as an extension of the Xerox Star 8010 system, which was programmed in Mesa, the language that inspired Niklaus Wirth to create Modula-2. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] Mesa evolved to Mesa/Cedar, which allowed for automatic memory management via reference counting and a tracing collector for the cycles. [LINK] The environment had a REPL and debugger inspired by the Smalltalk and Lisp systems at Xerox. Think of Swift Playgrounds, kind of. This system inspired Niklaus Wirth to create Oberon, which you can read about in his book, about how the OS was built. [LINK] In 2013, Niklaus Wirth revised the language and updated the book for a FPGA based computer. [LINK] There were several generations of the Oberon OS, the last one before it stop being relevant, the Bluebottle OS coded in Active Oberon variant. [LINK] It had a strange mix of UI, using a mix of text and mouse input. Basically all applications were dynamic modules and the procedures/functions with a special signature could be used from the UI. So you could select text or objects from applications, and invoke such operations on the selection. The Oberon System 3 and Oberon V4 with their Gadgets framework were the best experience, before AOS was designed. Most relevant OS in Modula-3 was SPIN OS, [LINK] There were a few others, this is just a small sample.

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pjmlp · 2014-06 · Reference

Self [LINK] Xerox Star User Interface [LINK] [VIDEO] Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk [LINK] The Smalltalk-80 Programming System [LINK] The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer [LINK] Symbolics Hypertext Document [LINK] Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC [LINK] The Mesa/Cedar programming environment [LINK] Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, [LINK] Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]

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