Branching the thread away from Compaq deskpro boards: "What We Have Lost"

[Grant Taylor]

On 7/27/21 4:27 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> This was a talk at a recent Chaos Computer Club congress: 
> https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost#t=1707
> 
> « We have ended up in a world where UNIX and Windows have taken over, 
> and most people have never experienced anything else. Over the years, 
> though, many other system designs have come and gone, and some of 
> those systems have had neat ideas that were nevertheless not enough 
> to achieve commercial success. We will take you on a tour of a variety 
> of those systems, talking about what makes them special.
> 
> In particular, we'll discuss IBM i, with emphasis on the Single 
> Level Store, TIMI, and block terminals Interlisp, the Lisp Machine 
> with the interface of Smalltalk OpenGenera, with a unique approach 
> to UI design TRON, Japan's ambitious OS standard More may be added 
> as time permits. »

Oh ... this looks interesting!

> It talks about Lisp Machine OSes, which interest me, but I especially 
> liked that there's a demo of Interlisp as well as the better-known 
> Symbolics OpenGenera. Unlike Genera, Interlisp is now FOSS and there 
> is an effort afoot to port it to modern OSes and hardware and revive 
> it as a Lisp IDE.
> 
> There's also a not-very-inspiring but all too rare demo of IBM 
> i. It's not pretty but this descendant of OS/400 is the last living 
> single-level store in active maintenance and production.

I've been discussing OS/400 / IBM i with a friend who owns three AS/400s.

> But the big thing that made me link to this after the discussion of 
> DOS/V, Chinese Windows 3.2 and Japanese DR-DOS and DR GEM, was the 
> demo of the final version of Japan's TRON OS.
> 
> Most people have never heard of TRON but it was extraordinarily 
> widely-used, embedded in billions of consumer electronics products. 
> Well, there was also a desktop-PC version, with its own very rich 
> object-oriented GUI, and this talk contains the only demo of it I've 
> ever seen.

Thank you for sharing.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die