System Archaeology Seminar

Old authoring systems have a more holistic/comfy feel because they were the system, not the app.

Comparative archaeology. What's easier or harder to do? What's the texture?

Let's explore these systems together. Let's make things in them. Let's talk about how they feel to use, and how they make you feel.

These are usually not text based. If they are, they have some sort of deep runtime that can be examined live.

Growing up within a worldview of "apps" and "dev tools" constrains people to see everything in those terms. It can take tremendous unlearning to even be able to /see/ an "authoring is always on" system for what it is. https://t.co/WJhh5OR44B

— Bret Victor (@worrydream) September 3, 2018

It's cool to read about influential old software like Sketchpad but also sad that often they've been lost to the sands of time and so we can't play with them.

— yoshiki (@yoshikischmitz) June 22, 2020

when talking about systems (OSes, PLs, games, applications), I think reading about them and their history is somewhat overrated, and actually _using_ / playing with them is underrated

(although finding a thing to use them for is often hard)

— Omar Rizwan (@rsnous) August 3, 2020

What to make?

• 7GUIs - https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/

• Maybe lean into the fiction/alternate history aspect. Make games or even just fictional apps.

Collection

Most of these, I later discovered, are a mere subset of Jonathan Edwards' formidable Gallery of programmer interfaces (pdf)

• Emacs and all its "do everything" insanity
  • org-mode
• Symbolics Lisp
• AgentSheets/AgentCubes
• Oney's InterState
• Tinker PBD for Lisp
• TouchDevelop (2011)
• TouchDesigner
• Smalltalk Zoo
• Squeak
  • Early Scratch?
  • Berkeley Snap!
• ToonTalk
• Etoys
• Self
• Forms/3
• Hypercard
• GRAIL

• Apple Dylan

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)

• HyperTIES

• Plan9

• 

• IRIS Intermedia System

• NLS Hyperscope

• JUNO-2
• Brad retrospective systems

• Cedar, Mesa, Tioga

• https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Creating-highly-interactive-and-graphical-user-by-Myers-Buxton/d064519e4be2b1c1fe9c3b3689b9fbff99187fca

  • Cedar Glossary

    

• Gargoyle

  

• The Silver Project

• Chorus (ok, 2015)

• Subtext

• CDG/HARC

• Borning's ThingLab

• Goldberg's SimKit

• Alternate Reality Kit

  

• Fabrik

• Lively Web (not dead yet!)

• STEPS

• Xanadu/Zipper?

• Aardappel

• Bounce

• Whyline (2005)

• Boxer

• Alice Pascal

• Kansas https://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/Softviz/CACM-Debugging/Kansas/Kansas.html

• https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Pygmalion%3A-a-creative-programming-environment.-Smith/0b6d3a09caf68a6ad0c04fa35698e13bcd6bbcd5

• Apple SK8
• John Pane's HANDS

(Forms/3)

Misc

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/science-math?page=2

Would it be on Hyperlink.academy?

• Yoshiki Ohshima's VPRI Archive and channel

• Archaeology of CAD

• List of Fantasy Consoles

• Why Hypercard Had to Die

• Byte Magazine Volume 06 Number 08 - Smalltalk

• JOY LISI RANKIN: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE UNITED STATES (via Yoshiki Schmitz)

• Kernel Perspective on Twitter finds some great stuff.

• Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual

• Hypercard Poetry (Hyperpoems)

• Eazel Desktop Environment

• BBC Computer Literacy Project (broken link?)

• Momenta Smalltalk Tablet

• Computer Utopias

• VPL/Body Electric

• mind-bicycles, VPL codex, CHM

• demos, etc

• Old CHI video list

• Visual Programming Languages - Snapshots

• Lowering the Barriers to Programming - Kelleher & Pausch 2003

• Chaim Gingold - Gadget Survey

• The Early History of Smalltalk (Kay, reprinted by Victor)

• Jonathan Edwards - Gallery of programmer interfaces

ARTWare: A Component Library for Building Domain-Oriented Authoring Environments

From Yoshiki Schmitz. Sources unknown right now.

Recapitulating computing

Here’s the Katz’s History of Mathematics (table of contents and the cover in the tweet below). Every chapter has a bunch of exercises, where you have to show or prove or solve something using the methodologies or number systems used in the chapter. https://t.co/nRMGQoMcor pic.twitter.com/RarQQC8CBQ

— :strawberry:Eli:herb:virtual plant maker:star2: (@logicsoup) January 31, 2021

http://scripting.com/2021/04/04/174604.html?title=theLostAppsOfThe80s

Jack Rusher's CHI threads https://twitter.com/jackrusher/status/1550390606559592448

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Backlinks

• Max's Inquiry
• Morphic for the web
• How do you create an interaction semantics?