Desktop Metaphor

[Mark Green]

I worked on the early Smalltalk systems, mainly variations of Smalltalk 76. They were there. It was the motivation for my MSc thesis which explored concurrent message passing for UI implementation including a demo of a system based on the desktop metaphor. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 23, 2018, at 8:02 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 01:19:37PM -0600, ben via cctalk wrote:
>> [...]
>> That may be true but DOS/WINDOWS and APPLE II all had TV display output
>> formats, now it is WIDE SCREEN ONLY. From what little I have seen about the
>> Alto, you had a full sized 8x10? page format. The printed page DOES matter
>> for graphic displays. Try and find a printed page size PDF reader, or one a
>> tad smaller. Reading a PDF on a KINDLE DOES NOT WORK. I suspect a good PDF
>> reader, a not tablet, is needed often for all the online doc's at places like
>> bit savers to get the knowledge close to a classic computer.
> 
> The Kindle is cheap crap optimised to sell Amazon eBooks. Any feature that does
> not directly push you to give more money to Amazon is made virtually unusable.
> This includes its PDF reader. I gave mine away in disgust.
> 
> I suspect that you also have a cheap crap monitor or laptop which uses a nasty
> 1080p TV panel. They have a much lower resolution than the printed page, so of
> course it's going to look like crap. A4 is 11.69" tall, and squeezing that into
> 1080 pixels gives you 92DPI - worse than fax. Rotating the screen into portrait
> mode gives more pixels, but now the limit is fitting the 8.27" wide document
> into 1080 pixels, or 130DPI. (Obviously, these are DPIs of the source, not the
> scaled image on your monitor.)
> 
> I have a 15" 2880 by 1800 display on my laptop, which has a pretty good PDF
> reader which will show two pages side-by-side. The resolution is high enough
> that it's as good as reading off paper, albeit scaled down to about 70% because
> the screen is physically smaller than A4.
> 
> Plug my laptop into a nice HiDPI monitor -- or indeed any good-enough laptop
> into one of those cheap 4K monitors which use scummy UHD TV panels -- and PDFs
> become gloriously large and crisp. Go on, find €300 or so and treat yourself to
> a new display.
>