It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years. Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards.
2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for vector graphics.
Text labels on menus and buttons is such an improvement over the undecipherable "flat school" icons that are currently used everywhere.
Yeah I would love to see a modern Fluxbox. My only issue with Fluxbox on Ubuntu and similar is other DE's seem to have better visual support for wireless. I have no way of connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon anywhere. I don't want to have to install components from another DE. Also they seem to mostly be abandoned. I have the same issue with tiling WM's. I don't want to have to configure my DE / VM it should just work, what I should configure is preferential settings not functional settings.
My Manjaro-i3 environment worked out of the box and had all of the things you'd expect (wifi icon, volume icon, battery indicator etc). The only reason I had to configure anything at all is because of personal taste. I find the Manjaro WM packages pretty good, personally.
I tried Manjaro before, didn't have the nicest experience getting it setup on one of my laptops. I try to stick to Ubuntu derived Linux distros cause they usually support my hardware cleanly enough. I wouldn't mind trying it out again though, but i3 is a lot different from Fluxbox.
I mentioned i3 only because you mentioned tiling window managers requiring too much configuration to setup. Manjaro also has a AwesomeWM distribution as an alternative tiling WM.
But aside from tiling window managers, Manjaro also has pre-packaged distributions with Openbox, XFCE, Budgie, Mate and Deepin and a few other less lightweight environments like KDE and Gnome. There's also the "architect edition" which does require a bunch of configuration.
Right, but you get the idea yea? If you sat me down at the machine ten seconds ago and said "turn on the WiFi," would "run a command in terminal that doesn't have the words network, wifi, or internet in it" really be at the top of the list of things I'd try?
That's not the point of these fringe desktop environments.
If you sat someone in front of custom configured i3wm, they would not have a clue how to do anything, really. The point is that the owner can have a nice customized and highly effective experience of using a computer.
There's a way to configure wifi easily without an icon, with some text based menus and nmtui is one way to do it if you use NetworkManager. You don't need an icon/GUI. Also there's nm-applet, so you can have a tray icon and GUI even in these DEs.
>they would not have a clue how to do anything, really //
Ha, used a little MacBook for essentially the first time 2 days ago, it was being used to present a slideshow (MS Powerpoint). I tried to advance beyond the end of the slide stack and it closed to the editor [terrible UX for me, IMO it should blank the screen and show a message on the laptop; maybe that's the default, wasn't my machine obvs], I was completely lost trying to scroll the slide chooser (left pane) as there was no scroll bar, and no pgup/pgdn keys, click-scroll [which works in other UI that I use] was rearranging the slides instead of scrolling. It's so easy to get lost in unfamiliar UI.
The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land.
640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.
I remember paying $129 for Mac OS X 10.0 and it didn't feel anything like NeXT.
On a supposedly state of the art Mac G4, it ran like a lobotomized sloth mostly because of the heavy new graphics stack. The giant fonts, translucent titlebars, pinstripe patterns and "lickable" candy color buttons were the aesthetic opposite of the 2-bit original NeXT.
While 10.1 did a decent job of patching up more egregious issues, 10.2 Jaguar was the first truly usable iteration of OS X, and it incidentally also brought the first bits of toning down to Aqua.
A lot of folks fondly remember Snow Leopard but for me the golden era for OS X was 10.2 - 10.4. 10.5 and 10.6 were great too, but honestly speaking I wouldn’t be bothered if I had to use a modern version of 10.4 for day to day work.
IIRC, Leopard was a bit of a disappointment. It was delayed because they moved engineers to work on the first iPhone... And that's pretty much when Mac stopped being a priority at Apple.
> And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
That's actually my favorite feature of the Finder and really the only thing I miss when using Windows sometimes. Using arrow keys + typing a letter or two to jump through dirs, and being able to see full hierarchy the whole time works really well with my mental model of the filesystem in a way the tree-based list view never does.
The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
Very interesting. My first Mac was an OS9 machine that came out so close to the release of OSX that it came with a free upgrade coupon.
I had a NeXT at work at the same time, and my memory is that the two environments were significantly different. Different enough that I gave the OS9 machine to my wife when OSX came out because it was so easy to use (she had a PS/2).
The actual HTTP requests this browser makes seem to be going through a proxy somewhere which I'm guessing renders the page on the server using this legacy look and returns it to be displayed. I thought it was using ajax to load pages directly from whatever URL I typed.
I'm surprised this had no support for the <ol> tag because numbered lists aren't rendering.
--
Edit: yeah I just noticed how all the links on every page have the domain part changed to worldwideweb.cern.ch.
But damn I can't help but remember Newton's "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Tim BL did not invent URIs, TCP/IP, domain names, or hypertext. He simply figured out a brilliant way to combine all these things together. Satoshi Nakamoto did not invent hashing, proof-of-work, signatures, or any of the other cryptographic protocols that make Bitcoin possible. Likewise, he simply put all these different ideas together in a brilliant way.
Ironically (and anecdotally) I remember pages loading much more slowly back then than now, on average. People comparing the two need to remember just how much faster and better optimized computers are now, as well as the speed of broadband versus dialup.
"Ironic" in that a lot of people here complain about how slow the modern web is versus the simpler purely static web of the past, when the modern web even with all the javascript BS is qualitatively faster.
I remember using newsgroups back in college. Unbelievable that we have open protocols for that type of stuff but everything seems to be trending to sovereign news sites.
Funny how for a while (back in the days) URLs in the offline world had "http://" before the "www", when (IMO) "www" and ".com" at the end would have been enough to tell people that it's a website URL, and modern browsers of the day were clever enough anyway to be able to load URLs entered without the protocol. Tragically nowadays marketers have replaced the URL with (facebook logo)/(their page URL on Facebook), or just "Search for $keyword", knowing they've done enough SEO work (or paid Google/Bing enough?) to make that $keyword the 1st search/ad result.
It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years. Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards.
2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for vector graphics.
Text labels on menus and buttons is such an improvement over the undecipherable "flat school" icons that are currently used everywhere.
Yeah I would love to see a modern Fluxbox. My only issue with Fluxbox on Ubuntu and similar is other DE's seem to have better visual support for wireless. I have no way of connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon anywhere. I don't want to have to install components from another DE. Also they seem to mostly be abandoned. I have the same issue with tiling WM's. I don't want to have to configure my DE / VM it should just work, what I should configure is preferential settings not functional settings.
You probably also want a battery and volume indicator
> I have the same issue with tiling WM's.
My Manjaro-i3 environment worked out of the box and had all of the things you'd expect (wifi icon, volume icon, battery indicator etc). The only reason I had to configure anything at all is because of personal taste. I find the Manjaro WM packages pretty good, personally.
I tried Manjaro before, didn't have the nicest experience getting it setup on one of my laptops. I try to stick to Ubuntu derived Linux distros cause they usually support my hardware cleanly enough. I wouldn't mind trying it out again though, but i3 is a lot different from Fluxbox.
I mentioned i3 only because you mentioned tiling window managers requiring too much configuration to setup. Manjaro also has a AwesomeWM distribution as an alternative tiling WM.
But aside from tiling window managers, Manjaro also has pre-packaged distributions with Openbox, XFCE, Budgie, Mate and Deepin and a few other less lightweight environments like KDE and Gnome. There's also the "architect edition" which does require a bunch of configuration.
>connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon
I usually just run nmtui in a terminal.
This. It uses dialog like interface.
Right, but you get the idea yea? If you sat me down at the machine ten seconds ago and said "turn on the WiFi," would "run a command in terminal that doesn't have the words network, wifi, or internet in it" really be at the top of the list of things I'd try?
Edit: oh, that's some sort of ui opening command?
That's not the point of these fringe desktop environments.
If you sat someone in front of custom configured i3wm, they would not have a clue how to do anything, really. The point is that the owner can have a nice customized and highly effective experience of using a computer.
There's a way to configure wifi easily without an icon, with some text based menus and nmtui is one way to do it if you use NetworkManager. You don't need an icon/GUI. Also there's nm-applet, so you can have a tray icon and GUI even in these DEs.
>they would not have a clue how to do anything, really //
Ha, used a little MacBook for essentially the first time 2 days ago, it was being used to present a slideshow (MS Powerpoint). I tried to advance beyond the end of the slide stack and it closed to the editor [terrible UX for me, IMO it should blank the screen and show a message on the laptop; maybe that's the default, wasn't my machine obvs], I was completely lost trying to scroll the slide chooser (left pane) as there was no scroll bar, and no pgup/pgdn keys, click-scroll [which works in other UI that I use] was rearranging the slides instead of scrolling. It's so easy to get lost in unfamiliar UI.
We can easily adapt if we want to, however.
Personally I get along with nmtui from the command line (as user) but I appreciate the desire for a tray icon of some kind.
The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land. 640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.
I remember paying $129 for Mac OS X 10.0 and it didn't feel anything like NeXT.
On a supposedly state of the art Mac G4, it ran like a lobotomized sloth mostly because of the heavy new graphics stack. The giant fonts, translucent titlebars, pinstripe patterns and "lickable" candy color buttons were the aesthetic opposite of the 2-bit original NeXT.
While 10.1 did a decent job of patching up more egregious issues, 10.2 Jaguar was the first truly usable iteration of OS X, and it incidentally also brought the first bits of toning down to Aqua.
A lot of folks fondly remember Snow Leopard but for me the golden era for OS X was 10.2 - 10.4. 10.5 and 10.6 were great too, but honestly speaking I wouldn’t be bothered if I had to use a modern version of 10.4 for day to day work.
Agreed, 10.4 Tiger was the high point.
IIRC, Leopard was a bit of a disappointment. It was delayed because they moved engineers to work on the first iPhone... And that's pretty much when Mac stopped being a priority at Apple.
> And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
That's actually my favorite feature of the Finder and really the only thing I miss when using Windows sometimes. Using arrow keys + typing a letter or two to jump through dirs, and being able to see full hierarchy the whole time works really well with my mental model of the filesystem in a way the tree-based list view never does.
The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
Very interesting. My first Mac was an OS9 machine that came out so close to the release of OSX that it came with a free upgrade coupon.
I had a NeXT at work at the same time, and my memory is that the two environments were significantly different. Different enough that I gave the OS9 machine to my wife when OSX came out because it was so easy to use (she had a PS/2).
There is some kind of easter egg when you click the white circle in the footer it opens this image https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/images/wow.jpg
Some meme I don't know about?
That is a photo of Jeremy Keith [https://adactio.com] who was part of the team involved in this effort: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/colophon/
The actual HTTP requests this browser makes seem to be going through a proxy somewhere which I'm guessing renders the page on the server using this legacy look and returns it to be displayed. I thought it was using ajax to load pages directly from whatever URL I typed.
I'm surprised this had no support for the <ol> tag because numbered lists aren't rendering.
--
Edit: yeah I just noticed how all the links on every page have the domain part changed to worldwideweb.cern.ch.
But damn I can't help but remember Newton's "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Tim BL did not invent URIs, TCP/IP, domain names, or hypertext. He simply figured out a brilliant way to combine all these things together. Satoshi Nakamoto did not invent hashing, proof-of-work, signatures, or any of the other cryptographic protocols that make Bitcoin possible. Likewise, he simply put all these different ideas together in a brilliant way.
Awesome. And Hacker News holds up pretty well!
https://imgur.com/a/KWl3iUp
A bit more information about the typeface created for this project, which is open source: https://github.com/djrrb/CERN-www-fonts/blob/master/README.m...
(The type world being a small one, this design had assistance from David Jonathan Ross, the designer of the Input coding typeface)
Your link leads to a 404.
Wow, the internet was fast back then.
I wonder how slow the actual one was
Ironically (and anecdotally) I remember pages loading much more slowly back then than now, on average. People comparing the two need to remember just how much faster and better optimized computers are now, as well as the speed of broadband versus dialup.
Modern sites have nothing on the awful experience of browsing the web on dialup.
Try browsing a modern site on dialup.
Ironically? I assumed your grand-parent was joking. A top-end PC in 1990 was a 33MHz i486 with 4Mb of RAM and a 9600 bit/s modem.
"Ironic" in that a lot of people here complain about how slow the modern web is versus the simpler purely static web of the past, when the modern web even with all the javascript BS is qualitatively faster.
Try (selectively) disabling javascript on the modern web.
I remember using newsgroups back in college. Unbelievable that we have open protocols for that type of stuff but everything seems to be trending to sovereign news sites.
Holy crap, my website actually looks decent in this...
It took me a minute to figure out that I needed to properly type in the URL of a website.
Funny how for a while (back in the days) URLs in the offline world had "http://" before the "www", when (IMO) "www" and ".com" at the end would have been enough to tell people that it's a website URL, and modern browsers of the day were clever enough anyway to be able to load URLs entered without the protocol. Tragically nowadays marketers have replaced the URL with (facebook logo)/(their page URL on Facebook), or just "Search for $keyword", knowing they've done enough SEO work (or paid Google/Bing enough?) to make that $keyword the 1st search/ad result.
Which returns full circle to "AOL keywords"...
If you want to follow a link, place the cursor in it and select Links->Follow Link in the menu bar to the left.
Browsing different adresses proved difficult, it only worked for me by editing the URL and loading the page in a new tab.
Good to see they fixed the remote code execution exploit identified by: https://github.com/jtang613/dcq2018_www
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19206433
Really cool! The illusion broke when emoji could be rendered correctly, I think the original interface could not even render basic utf8.
I could be wrong but I remember a point in my career where using utf8 for HTML documents was a new and shiny thing.
WorldWideWeb predates UTF-8 by several years.
Curious if they have this server segregated from the rest of the network or you can browse other internal resources through it.
surf the web with ip 188.184.108.149, ISP CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research.. :s
"why is Google in German?" Was my first thought