Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo

Eric Bier
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2012–2021
YouTube
2K views · 15 years ago · demo · intermediate · historical

A video demo by Eric Bier, of Xerox PARC, showing documents used as user interfaces. It belongs to the family of PARC-era demos that includes Cedar, the Xerox Star and Smalltalk.

HN lists it among the amazing Xerox PARC demos to watch, a point of comparison for how early graphical environments worked.

“Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing”
GUI historyHCI research
#xeroxparc#ericbier#documents#cedar#earlygui

2 comments from Hacker News

p
@pjmlp2021 · in “On Repl-Driven Programming”
Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" link "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" ▶ this video "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" link "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" link "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) link "The Interlisp programming environment" link And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage link link
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m
@mhd2012 · in “Blit: a multitasking, windowed Unix GUI from 1982”
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: link Some screenshots & pics: link Cedar demo: ▶ this video (Smalltalk and Oberon are a bit easier to find and more well-known anyway)
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