Since we're sharing, I have fond memories of my using my the Sun thin clients at university. They were slow to start up and use for the most part, but once you got to the terminal... it was great.
Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.
Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.
Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.
I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.
I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.
I was spoilt by SGI and their wonderful interface, where every detail was awesomely cool. The Sun machines were just old-fashioned at this superficial but important level of how it all looked, but only if you knew better, and that meant experience of SGI. In the world of IRIX, we had CPU-eater desktop wallpaper, meanwhile, on Sun, you had some badly drawn window decorations.
I imagine this to be the awful GUI that you speak of.
I say look and feel is superficial, however, when you have to learn a variant of UNIX with slightly different command line switches to the UNIX you know, with an interface worse than even Windows (3.11), for it to run dog slow, a lot of copium is needed. A poor interface gets in the way of what you are trying to do, a cool interface just lets you get on with it.
Motif wasn't considered ugly at the time (at least by most people). If you ran Netscape on your SGI, you know what Motif looks like.
Motif did have a reputation for being a total drag to develop with, though. It's based on Xt. So is Athena, so if you've ever written an Xaw app it's pretty similar.
Right, I still remember the dotted XaW scrollbars that would scroll a little or a lot depending on where you clicked them; and playing Freeciv with XaW in my early Linux days. Good times.
Motif was even released as open source OpenMotif, but faaar too late. The whole Xt architecture in general seemed like an overcomplex solution looking for a problem, and it was easier to either use Xlib directly or go the gtk route.
The resources system was really cool though. It gave you a unified configuration system and allowed deep levels of themeability. I remember you could assign a pixmap to every element of Netscape 3's interface, for instance.
thegagne · · focus · HN ↗
Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.
Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.
Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.
I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.
I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.
Theodores · · focus · HN ↗
I imagine this to be the awful GUI that you speak of.
I say look and feel is superficial, however, when you have to learn a variant of UNIX with slightly different command line switches to the UNIX you know, with an interface worse than even Windows (3.11), for it to run dog slow, a lot of copium is needed. A poor interface gets in the way of what you are trying to do, a cool interface just lets you get on with it.
spauldo · · focus · HN ↗
Motif did have a reputation for being a total drag to develop with, though. It's based on Xt. So is Athena, so if you've ever written an Xaw app it's pretty similar.
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
Motif was even released as open source OpenMotif, but faaar too late. The whole Xt architecture in general seemed like an overcomplex solution looking for a problem, and it was easier to either use Xlib directly or go the gtk route.
spauldo · · focus · HN ↗