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Comment by urbit | Hacker News Reader

Most awesome paragraph:

One blinker is associated with the mouse: when you slide the mouse along a surface, that blinker moves in a corresponding direction. When the mouse is moved very rapidly, the mouse blinker gets big like Godzilla in order to maintain visibility. Small children should be taken out of the room before demonstrating this frightening feature.

More broadly, reading this manual made me realize (a) how many of the ideas of the modern GUI probably were influenced by the Symbolics, and (b) how many more ideas 1981 had than today. The sense of freedom to do anything, try anything, is all over the document.

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Oh, yes, the Godzilla mouse cursor was a great feature, and as I recall there wasn't such on the Xerox Altos that were donated to MIT in ~1980. In those days, pretty much anyone developing a window system was doing serious innovation.

There was another big UI detail that's been somewhat lost, a "don't move the text" default behavior you see with the less program. When I first visited Western Digital, which was developing the 68000 engineering workstation that LMI's first custom processor was going to run in back then in 1982, the people developing the video were spending a lot of effort and budget on scrolling of the bitmapped screen.

The MIT AI Lab's approach, initially out of necessity when they first did this with a first generation PDP-11/20 and Intel 1103 first generation DRAMs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_1103), they just kept the text in place and moved the cursor, which can be confusing in that new text is not automatically at the bottom, but is a lot easier to skim and read than moving text.

That happens to me every time I delve into Xerox PARC documentation.

I only had a glimpse of those technologies by means of Smalltalk Visual Works and Oberon, and it was quite productive.

Nowadays it feels like only Cocoa, JVM and .NET development environments are the closest mainstream developers get from the whole developer experience from those days.

> When the mouse is moved very rapidly, the mouse blinker gets big like Godzilla in order to maintain visibility.

That happens in OS X El Capitan presently.

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