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Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Ah, early GUIs. For comparison, take a look at Xerox' Cedar and Smalltalk, or Wirth's Lillith and Oberon, all from pretty much the same era.

The Lilith systems are often overlooked. They predate the Blit, are programmed in Modula-2, translated to bytecode. Oberon is a bit more well-known, but still not as much as both the language and the OS deserve.

Lilith demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc

Some screenshots & pics: http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=photos-of-lilith

Cedar demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk

(Smalltalk and Oberon are a bit easier to find and more well-known anyway)

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If you want more modern early GUIs investigate Plan 9, also by Rob Pike. Rio is like Blit and ACME is like Oberon.

While the pedigree does stretch back a bit, I wouldn't call Acme "early". The paper came out in '94…

Acme is based on the Oberon system (1985)

Which in turn took quite some influence from Cedar/Mesa at Xerox. But one might as well say that KDE 4.9 (2012) is based on MacOS (1984), that doesn't make it an "early GUI" in my eyes.

Well, that the "modern" part. The interface itself is by Writh, no idea when h published a paper about it, that the "early" part.

It is creepy how much that looks like 8 1/2 and rio. Pike clearly thought he had a good thing.

Ah, early GUIs.

Sadly, the 5620 launched in 1984, the same year as the first Macintosh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.p...

Not really competitors. The VT220 terminal (the target for every "terminal emulator") came out in '83.

I got a smile out of the Cedar demo talking about documents as user interfaces. Arguably the concept of the web as a user interface pre-dates the web!

The point being that this is an editable document serving as a user interface. Which, if I remember correctly, some people once envisioned for the web (cf. Amaya[1]), but never really took hold.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_%28web_editor%29

Oh man, I remember Modula-2. It was what my engineering course taught us to code in. That was handy on my CV.

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