I made a tour of an obscure window system called Bellcore MGR, made by the Bell Core Research and bearing a strong resemblance to Plan 9's 8.5.
The tour also comes with a short overview of the $HOME MOVIE film authoring tool from 1990. There are many screenshots, a 40-minute long video with Mozart and Liszt, and a hard disk image for 86box.
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •The part that took me the most time was writing a decoder for a video from 1991. The video is a demo of the $HOME MOVIE system, 1152 x 900 with voice and music. HD video from 1991, folks!
youtube.com/watch?v=1j3WYV2sQn…
- YouTube
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root42
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to root42 • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •root42
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to root42 • • •@root42 I have a sick hobby of doing this one thing to the files I find...
As the file was compressed with LZ, I could tell the insides are going to be some sort of bitmap. This would have been enough to unpack the video, but conveniently there were sources for "play_data" and "to_ascii" tools that parse this format into the MGR system calls. I only had to implement my own blitter for 32-bit-aligned bitmaps with Plan9-style ROPs, and re-time the blitting events (I couldn't do it perfectly, but I think it's good enough - it certainly works much better than play_data on Linux with my Sun-compatibility patch)
Ted Mielczarek
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •efscher
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to efscher • • •HP van Braam
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •NEEEEERRRDDDDD
Also, that jaunty music... 😁
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Nina Kalinina • •like this
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thinkberg
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Paolo Amoroso
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •scripta predecessor of $HOME MOVIE, or possibly a successor?Nina Kalinina
in reply to Paolo Amoroso • • •kaveman
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •This is fantastic! -- back in the 90s wanted to try MGR but could never get it to run on my old PC. There were several attempts by various people to port it to the linux framebuffer, sdl etc. MGR was a clever idea and could still be useful as a remote semi-graphical shell. And those gorgeous bitmap fonts... should convert to BDF or even opentype bitmaps one of these days...
brings back memories, thanks!
Nina Kalinina
in reply to kaveman • • •GitHub - alex-arknetworx/mgr: Bellcore MGR on X11
GitHubsolastalgia kris
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to solastalgia kris • • •Willard Goosey
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Awesome work, thank you for this!
I'd totally forgotten about mgrbd!
Also that yellow on black, yeah I spent too many hours staring into that...
Edit: game name
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Willard Goosey • • •Tachibana Kanade
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •The “middle button for menu”paradigm reminds me of RISC OS.
(I think that the mantra “middle button for menu” might be the only thing many people in my generation took away from learning computers in primary school, knowledge which became worse than useless as soon as they left school, as nobody anywhere else ran RISC OS!)
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Tachibana Kanade • • •Mariusz
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Stephen U
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Stephen U • • •thanks for reaching out! My understanding is that Rob Pike developed 8.5 in 1989-90, based on his earlier work on Blit. Judging by the video* I can find, Blit had a "user experience" very similar to what MGR offered - plain windows without headers, drop-down menus, and so on? Could it be that Blit, developed in 82-83, was somewhat an inspiration to MGR? I am especially curious because Blit, MGR, 8.5 and Rio all have a very distinct look and feel. Most other UIs I know about were heavily inspired by Smalltalk-80 and/or Xerox Alto, and thus have window title bars (but then early X10/X11 didn't have title bars, either).
* youtube.com/watch?v=4YuRkOxNsD…
- YouTube
www.youtube.comNina Kalinina
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I think MGR really rocks! In terms of sheer performance, it beats most desktop environments, and it seems to be quite portable, too. But ultimately it didn't became the standard for Unix-like systems. Could it be due to political forces (e.g. license limitations - Bellcore non-commercial vs MIT), architectural reasons (e.g. limited support for colour displays), marketing, or perhaps it was pure luck?
Also, if you'd want to re-design MGR today, what would you keep and what would you change about the architecture?
Stephen U
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Mgr origin story. In 1982 while at Exxon trying to improve the existing engineering computing environment, which consisted of typing FORTRAN code into an IBM3270 terminal and receiving, the next morning by interoffice mail, a neatly rubber-banded roll of printer paper with source and execution output. Rubber band balls were a thing.
While participating in a "Xerox Star" pilot, I saw the famous "Alto Demo": I wanted the engineering version of it - similar GUI, but on a Unix workstation. I saw a Sun/100 at the Unix conference that year, bought one, and wrote MGR early in 1983 (users of the first release called it "mgr" after the "mgr.c" file containing the source code: the name stuck).
I joined Bell Labs in the fall of 1983, ended up in "Bellcore" following the 1984 "breakup", convinced my new boss (M. Lesk) to buy a ½ dozen of the newly announced Sun/2s, and rewrote the window system from scratch - the only thing I kept from the Exxon version was the name. [July '83 screenshot]
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to Stephen U • • •Jeff
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •thank you for reboosting this. I was able to spend some more time with this, and it's great.
(I think you could partially lampoon my xuake compositor as an overwraught wayland-mgr. There's definitely some convergent evolution between xuake, mgr and cwm.)
Thom, not a YouTuber
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •How did I miss this!
...you know where this is going.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Thom, not a YouTuber • • •Christian Tietze
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •"I've implemented a simple decoder of the video format in Python, and re-timed the keyframes to some sensible values"
What!? 😁
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Christian Tietze • • •paddlaren
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •This really gave me a flash back to my early times with a Sun workstation back in -91. We did use open look olwm and olwvm with virtual desktops but in monochrome and the background was very similar.
No actual starter icons on the desktop, only icons for started apps.
It was a confusing time moving from DOS with Borland C++ to unix and makefiles and new keybaord shortcuts for everything.
But I survived the change and had a Sun workstation on my desk for 9 years to come ❤️
Alexander Shendi
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Alexander Shendi • • •