GUI & ex11 (CLIM)

[Jay Nelson]

 From the site Luke pointed to:

 > A pioneering system which uses these ideas was Dynamic
 > Windows, the high-level window system of Genera, the
 > operating system of the Symbolics Lisp Machine. The first
 > versions of Dynamic Windows appeared with Genera 7.0 in
 > 1986 [19]. Presentations have been used for the Lisp program
 > development environment and for a command processor (nowadays
 > called shell). A command like Show Directory host:>dir>*.lisp
 > prints file information into a window. When,
 > afterwards, a command Compile File is given, all
 > the Lisp files are mouse-sensitive and can be
 > clicked on. It is also possible to directly click
 > onto the file name and select, for instance, Edit
 > File via a pop-up menu.

Oh, how I miss my old Symbolics machine!
Presentations were the cat's meow -- you would
"present" an object to the scrolling history of
the window display and it was magically mouseable.
#<OBJECT #x87465905> would let you pop up a menu,
change a instance variable, commit and continue.
Sweet.

We would leave our machines on without
rebooting until we ran out of memory, so you could
scroll back in a window and pull out an instance
of an object you presented a month ago -- disassemble
it to get the code again -- and grindf it into the
edit buffer.  Or just pull down a menu, hit suspend,
snatch the source code for the OS from the interpreter,
hit resume and paste it into your edit buffer to mimic
the OS menus.

And what is Emacs without a Hyper and Super key?!

 > Pictures of Symbolics machines can be found at here.

Uh, oh.  Not even a museum piece left?  How sad.  It will be 20
years before we rediscover the ability that Symbolics had 20 years
ago.

jay