Xerox Parc - Office Alto Commercial

Well, unix is another really bad OS compared to it's historical predecessors: at first they decide for a bad programming language to need less hw horsepower and separate that cheap language from the user language (C for the system, for "complex" things, shell scripts for the end user), for equal reasons they decide that's no need for GUIs, while far before unix we have had GUIs, touch monitor, even the world first video-conference with screen sharing in LAN (the so called Mother of all the Demos, in 1968 [1] then they realize that's was not that good and graphic systems start to appear on Unix, far limited, complex, that completely violate unix principles since for GUIs there were no IPCs, classic PostScript GUIs do support some user-programming but not really something like classic systems, CDE support a certain integration but again nothing like classic systems. Since them all "modern" systems keep rediscovering in limited, limited and bug ridden ways what historical systems have done far better decades before... I think many should just see classic advertisement like ▶ this video than see it's date and where we are today... It's not only security it's the overall design. In the past hw resources was limited an so hacks and slowness were common, hw itself being "in a pioneering phase" was full of hacks and ugliness but evolving those systems would have led us too the moon while we are still in the middle age... [1] link

Two notes: one is how much a surgeon need to know about molecular biology to properly work, a construction workers about the concrete chemistry, a bus driver about mechanics and so on. The other is that in the past "frameworks" was just the OS, with accessible sources, easy to be explored and end-user programming in mind. There was some, like Smalltalk from Xerox Workstations (take a look at a modern Pharo demo to see them or this ▶ this video old commercial demo) or LispM (for instance link to give a bit of eye candy) etc. Now if students start high level in these systems well, they do learning digging as much as they want a bit at a time, nothing hidden. Instead we have pushed for commercial reasons a gazillion of "isolated layers" of crap just to been able to sell bits a bit more. Do you imaging more realistic today students learning ASM to be run on CPUs now complex enough to have a full OS inside or coming back to a single app-OS-framework like in the past? As a hint: look the evolutionary path from widgets GUIs to WebUIs, from visual menus to search&narrow, NotebookUIs, "prompts" etc. There will be an immense amount of work to do of course, something that can happen in FLOSS world backed by academia and large research labs, definitively not by some even giant enterprise, but we are anyway going there, the quick we realize the less damage, pain and waster works we will make.