> On Mon, 14 Dec 1998 Hans.Franke_at_mch20.sbs.de wrote:
> > I think they have been insirated by the Star like anyone
> > else, but the Ventura design is more to the direction
> > of a single programm and of course made to fit GEM (or
> > did DR made GEM to fit the Publisher ?). GEM itself
> I think GEM was made first and Publisher was the only really big app for
> it. I have a couple of boxes of Ventura and GEM as well over here. The
> filemanager is worse than on a macintosh (actually, it's worse than the
> MS-DOS shell, IMHO). The graphics have no refined quality to them, they
> look like a screensaver that draws boxes with random coordinates :)
Maybe take the time and the avaulabe video cards into account.
Also, witch version of GEM you are refering to ?
There has been a lot of aplications, from 1st Word to Calamus.
And a lot of dedicated apps also - We still have some GEM apps
running :) Dont forgett, MS-Win was only vapourware at this
thime - and until 3.0 only some Sidekick XL.
> Were GEM and Lisa the first non-Xerox GUI projects, or was there some kind
> of weird little company that made a perfect gui but vanished into thin
> air?
I don't know, GEM was the first atempt to cereate a (almost)
hardeware (and Hardeware vendor) independant GUI. Funny fact,
the basics of GEM, the GDI and AES are staight foreward
developments from CP/M 3.0 and GSX - all GDI structures
and functions are basicly GSX :), even some AES structures
are alreay within GSX. Back when I did some GEM development
I always suspected that GEM was completly developed under
CP/M 3.0. Anyway, a port to CP/M should be possible straight
foreward. Such an MTX500 could give a real nice GEM workstation.
> > was like the Mac a downsized (and crushed) version of
> > the Star (I still belive all 'modern' GUI systems are
> > just the mouse interface but noone took the desktop :( ).
> > Maybe with an exception of the OS/2 desktop (Althrough
> > still a GUI, it includes a lot more OO than most other).
> What about NeXT? That's _supposed_ to be OO...
> Is there any way I could find out more in-depth about what the UI was
> like? This sounds like an interesting machine. What exactly is meant by an
> OO desktop? What about the Amiga? I've heard many people who've used it
> say the same thing about it as you're saying about the Xerox machines, and
> yet I have the feeling you won't agree.
There is a nice book: The GUI-OOUI War; Windows vs. OS/2;
The Designers Guide to Human Computer Interfaces;
ISBN 0-442-01750-2; explaining the main diferences between
GUI and OOUI from a users viewpoint.
Shure, I won't agree - your feeling is right - The AmigaOS
(like GEM or MacOS) is just a GUI - A graphical display
to a machine - The AmigaOS more than both other.
On the other hand, a OOUI displays a consistent view(point :)
to a 'workingspace' regardless what machine layes below.
And NextStep is, like OS/2, still displaying the machine below.
Another keypoint is that every programm within a GUI (maybe)
uses a differen symbolism, and common methaphors are a good
will agreement between programmers while OOUIs not only support
consistent interfaces, but rather make any other way than the
OO way hard to go.
Maybe take some studies in Smaltalk, and you will be supriesed
how easy OO can bee if the tools are not only offer OO as one
possibility, but rather makes it fun to do it.
Since there are some real nice Smalltalk implementations for
x86 PCs (real mode) its maybe even a historic study.
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
Received on Tue Dec 15 1998 - 09:32:37 GMT