• KillSlaveOwners [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    5 months ago

    To my fellow nerds, does anyone know what the gui is? It definitely looks like an old school window manager. I’ve played around with the standard Xorg one that no one uses outside of a pure openBSD install as well as fvwm but I don’t think it’s quite either of them.

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      I am a turbo-nerd about these machines. Those are Silicon Graphics machine(s?) running IRIX (SGI Unix)! The GUI is based on Motif (ancient Unix UI toolkit that preceded things like GTK and QT) and 4DWM (SGI’s own window manager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4Dwm). I actually made a post about these things earlier lol: https://hexbear.net/post/2763908

      Fun fact: the graphical file viewer that Samantha uses in the movie to do… something… is real and I’ve used it lol. It’s called “fsn”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ

      I have some posts about the MIPS (SGI bought MIPS Technologies Inc in the 90s) processors that were inside these things if you want linky

      Highly recommend looking up demos of IRIX online if you’re interested cuz it is a pleasure to use, very pretty and lots of sound effects

      • KillSlaveOwners [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        Oh sick! I’ll look into this more. I see you mentioned Plan9 in your bio. That is one level of Unix I haven’t dabbled in yet, have you messed around with 9front? I’ve always been intrigued at their commitment to maintaining an authentic Plan9 experience while adding support for modern hardware.

        • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Yess, I love 9front

          The 9front people are doing a great job of dragging Plan 9 into the 21st century after the project was abandoned by the original developers (the 9front people would say “before they went on display at Google” lol)

          In addition to better hardware support, some novel features have come out of the 9front project: new filesystems on-disk or otherwise (very very looking forward to ori’s “good enough filesystem” ending up in the system), a completely new and from scratch Git implementation (one of the only other complete implementations in the world), kernel tracing infrastructure similar to Solaris (idk much about this one but it’s called “dtracy”), etc etc etc

          And if you wanna realllly be completely bewildered, look into mycroftiv’s ANTS (Additional Namespace Tools for Plan 9) project. I was lucky enough to meet this guy once online before he died a few years ago, he had some wild ideas about how to construct distributed operating systems, absolutely love it lol. The Plan 9 community (mainly united around 9front) is a community of dreamers. My dream is a kind of “social operating system” in the service of communism, uniting the computational resources and information of all of society into a grid of computers that anyone can use, but also serving as a virtual meeting and collaborative space and as a distributed economic planning apparatus. Idk it’s a grand dream (and Plan 9 is far from that, although there is a “grid” a lot of the 9front people use to talk to each other and collaborate on) but I like to think about it and try to make parts of it real lol

          The Plan 9 developers once referred to their project as an attempt to build a Unix out of a lot of little systems instead of a system out of a lot of little Unixes (and the latter approach has won out under the market-based system, most people’s idea of distributed computing is like… Docker and Kubernetes agony-deep)

          I hope that makes sense, I am very tired lol

          I wrote a bit more about Plan 9 and its history to another Hexbear here a few months ago if you wanna read: https://hexbear.net/comment/4812784