News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The History of Windows 2.0.

Re:The History of Windows 2.0 by tempaway43355 on Thursday August 24, 2023 @05:51AM (#37246937)
Just for comparison the Acorn Archimedes launched in 1987 with Arthur OS (later to become Risc OS) with a full windowed desktop with overlapping windows etc. They were able to pull this off because they had designed a new processor that they called the "Acorn RISC Machine"*

Screenshot of 1987 desktop here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS#/media/File...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS

* ARM for short, you might have heard of it

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 2.0 by pjc50 on Thursday August 24, 2023 @06:10AM (#37247052)
RISCOS was great, although slightly eccentric in a couple of ways:

- "we have a three button mouse, we're going to make use of all of them" as opposed to Apple

- instead of file pickers, saving was done by drag-and-drop: press save and a window pops up with the file, which you drag to a target folder.

The !Application system, an early bundle mechanism, was a simple and effective form of packaging without having to do anything fancy.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 2.0 by tempaway43355 on Thursday August 24, 2023 @06:20AM (#37247143)
Yeah that drag and drop save was funny. It was the era of 'lets do this using drag and drop just because it looks cool and metaphorical - you are literally PUTTING that file IN that folder - geddit?'
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 2.0 by johnflan on Saturday August 26, 2023 @06:33AM (#37271484)
I don’t agree that it was eccentric, I used these as my first machine and they felt pretty natural. I would also suggest that these interactions weren’t completely standardised at that point.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 2.0 by mnd999 on Thursday August 24, 2023 @06:53AM (#37247358)
AmigaOS was similar (with a 68k) and that launched in 1985.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 2.0 by johnflan on Saturday August 26, 2023 @06:35AM (#37271494)
The Acorn was a marvel of its day (to me at least)
[ Parent | on HN ]