Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

Question

In my quest to recreate what a UNIX desktop would look like in the 80s-90s, I'm on a quest to find old, old programs and make them compile with today's compilers. Sure, I can start a copy of X without the xorg-redhat-die-ugly-pattern-die-die-die.patch patch (yes, that IS the (hilarious) name for the patch that takes X's 20 year old crosshatch pattern and replaces it with something else, eg black - info here and here), or I could just start a VNC server (Arch's Xvnc server doesn't have the patch, nor does RealVNC's, so I'm covered even if Arch's ever gets it). Then, I just start twm, xclock, xterm, xmh, oclock, etc, and bam, UNIX desktop. Or I could take it a little further...
What I'm looking for (whether X or terminal based):
- File managers (like the NeXT/Solaris ones)
- X11 desktop toys, accessories and utilities
- Window managers (like uwm and MWM)
- Text editors
- Anything old that you might know of, commercial or open source, other than v0.1 of the Linux kernel
I also want to expand my C knowledge, so what better way to do so than make old, stably written programs conform to the latest C guidelines? I'll be working with (hopefully) well-written code that's grown and been bugfixed over time, and because I have to fix them to make them work with the latest gcc/g++ I'll likely remember what I did to fix them, which just so happens (;)) to coincide with today's guidelines. IMHO, Win!
What post like this would be what it is without an initial contribution? Mine is 'xvt', an X terminal that appears to have started in the early '90s (1992-1993) and appears to aim to be a lighter weight version of xterm. It sure is that: htop says it checks in 3KB of RAM (specifically 3088 VIRT (virtual memory, how much the program has asked for regardless of how much RAM you have - something could ask for 16TB of RAM and that would be represented as VIRTual RAM), 1384 RES (resource usage) and 1084 SHR (X shared memory). It doesn't have color support, you can't scroll (you can get at some of the scrollback by resizing the window from what I've seen), resizing the window after clearing it has interesting effects, and it flickers a little on resize and update. Ahh, the nostalgia irssi and htop work with it though (albeit in black and white, and without box drawing characters although xvt is supposed to support those... *pokes ncurses*)
Note that because of this program's age you won't find things like a website or sourceforge project for it (lol) - your best bet is to download my current work with it (URL at the end of this paragraph), which in a nutshell involved deciding which of the debian or ubuntu packages to install, picking the ubuntu one (which was probably an exact copy of the debian one heh), downloading the ubuntu package, compiling it successfully, running it, it failing, poking the source, giving up, downloading and applying the patch I saw, applying the patch file, trying to compile it again which failed, discovering a bunch of new patches added to the dir by the original patch and applying those as well, trying to compile it again which worked, tried to run it again and it failed again, using man and google to my advantage, adding some header references, and finally, getting it to build. To be honest, it was a lot simpler than my explanation, but at any rate, here's my work (its source is slightly changed, I changed the font to "fixed" since the original "8x13" font didn't look very nice): xvt.tar.gz.
I also have an old web browser called Chimera from 1995 (not related to anything for Mac OS X) that I found some modified sources for, but my copy is so heavily modified that I probably couldn't call it Chimera anymore. You can still download the modified sources I used, and although Wikipedia isn't too keen on it, nobody's removed my install instructions from the page on Chimera I created a while ago (it contains a screenshot!!!), sooo... you can easily use those references to build Chimera if you want to try it yourself.
Note, I plan to tidy up these packages and make a couple of PKGBUILDs for them; if you do so, I won't be able to (but you can anyway, especially if you get impatient )
-dav7

Answer 1

Oooo.
Another Xaw freak.
Hi.
I made a NotePad clone (an app that you open, type in, hit ESC or close, and it remembers what you entered) with C and Xaw many months ago. It's only 20 lines, but since I knew zero C back then I had a major case of cut-and-paste-until-it-works, so it took like a fortnight to write. Also, *pokes lack of documentation*
Also...
I can't really find anything that measures up as a browser that uses X-, Motif- or similar-toolset.
hv3. Small on disk - 2-3MB for an HTML, CSS and JS capable browser (yeah, ":o") written in tcl, using the wonderfully icky tk for GUI. I heard that it used like 47MB in memory though.. soo....
-dav7
Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-12 12:18:32)