I'm beginning to think this show might not be 100% historically accurate.

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Wait is that NeXTstep window manager on a Sun Sparcstation?

@th Oh, that one did exist though. I worked with that for quite some time (screenshot of OpenStep for Solaris back here, and I also should still have the installation files somewhere): mastodon.infra.de/@galaxis/100). I think there was something like Sun had bought Lighthouse and wanted to publish their Nextstep productivity suite for Solaris or something like that? Never released, though.

Also, the full OpenStep 4 system was ported to sparc (and hppa) a little later on.

@th (Your screencap from that show still looks like a fake though😉...)

@galaxis that is an amazing bit of digital archaeology.

@th Well, the image is like, from decades ago 😉
Probably couldn't figure out how to take a screenshot without using xv back then.

Since OpenStep/Solaris ran on top of X (actually taking the role of a window manager, I assume?), it was kind of cool you could just have all the usual programs inside... Also I don't think anyone ever ported any OpenStep applications other than those that came with the initial distribution.

I should probably try to recreate that setup one day...

@th @galaxis I had not thought about xv for a quarter of a century. That screenshot gave me vertigo.

@phooky @th @galaxis xv is the mIRC of the Unix world. Did anyone ever register that thing?

@elb @phooky @th @galaxis i'm just chiming in here to say that i still have my mIRC registration code somewhere.

@elb @phooky @th @galaxis Yep, I did, circa 1996. There was a Linux driver for HP's SCSI flatbed scanners (ISTR a domain something like tummy.com or other) that operated on a patched version of xv. You paid them for the scanner driver, you got it + a registered xv by return

@phooky @th @galaxis I regularly think of xv. Whenever I look into my old backups I find .xvpics subdirs with thumbnails. A short while (10 years?) ago, I even downloaded it again from somewhere. There were only binaries then, not sure what the current situation is...

@eiZen My memories about the xv situation are hazy... I think it was shareware, but the source was available nevertheless?

The problem was more that almost no one had access to an compiler, so binary distribution was required (also, binaries were a smaller download). This only changed when gcc showed up, and I think it became possible at some point to bootstrap gcc from the cc fragment that Sun shipped in order to recompile customized SunOS kernels. Not sure about the timeline?

@phooky @th

@th I think there was a X window manager that emulated the NeXTstep visual appearance, including those big launcher buttons. Can't remember the name though.

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