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

[Tony Aiuto]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 9:21 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> 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.


I would argue that this is totally wrong. iOS, Android and other mobile
systems,
with decidedly different user experiences and programming interfaces than
desktop (or server) linux or windows are now the first, or maybe only,
experience
for many people. And even those are branching and evolving. As we get
better a consumer level  containerization and sandboxing, more end users
are seeing chimera's like Android apps running under ChromeOs or Windows
apps on macos and Linux.


> 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
>