While I enjoyed 4dwm when I had a sgi, I am not convinced the desktop environment was that great, it did however have a very nice file manager, which I guess is 90% of a desktop environment, so perhaps it was pretty good after all.
The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.
I'll take filled rounded corners over the window border bulge atrocity seen in IRIX.
Also keep in mind IRIX (and most classic desktops) assumed 72 DPI displays rather than 96 DPI displays. That means when you view a screenshot or render them unadjusted they look 75% the size they did back in the day. Still plenty denser in many ways... just not as much as loading it up on a modern "96 DPI is 100%" screen would imply.
This. The very reason I use KDE (I have tried tiling wm's, and they are horrible if I use my drawing tablet, which I use a LOT), then customize it in a way to minimize wasted space (taskbar on the left, take out window borders padding, etc).
Then I go and enable compact look on firefox, take out a bunch of useless icons for things I don't use, and bam my 4K screen is able to accommodate all my work. Even though I do still use 125% DPI scale, not via KDE mind you, because I love eyes.
And even then, it still looks slick and modern.
It's crazy how much space we waste with flat design on desktop. Crazyyy.
Funny, I'll have to look when back at a computer in a few days. I don't recall the padding being that bad. Granted... I do largely use it as an emacs machine. I'm sure that colors what I notice.
They did (sort of). They were called demos and trials. But there was no DRM. FlexLM was easy to crack. The WWW was largely plaintext.
I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)
(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)
I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).
One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.
What upgrades do you have? I only have a 500Mhz cpu, but i have 4 Gb and I put in an ssd. I also put in a modern power supply which makes it a little less loud.
The file manager in this looks a lot like my beloved ROX-Filer. Would love to try this if I could install it on FreeBSD. I don't see it in a cursory glance at Ports.
The name makes me think of Holomaxx Technologies (styled as holoMaXx technologies), the vanity DBA of one Ilarion Bilynsky, also known as SsZERO. SsZERO was a squirrely guy with an interesting USENET presence in the late nineties. At first he was a bit like the later Imari Stevenson: a spoiled, videogame-obsessed teenager whose confidence far exceeded his competence. He promised the Holomaxx Ultimate Video Game Project or UVGP, a kickass game console that would beat all others and even feature AGI, to everyone on rec.games.programmer and several other newsgroups, and became quite truculent, to the point of rudeness, when actual game devs replied with constructive criticism. He accused them all of "thinking linearly", as opposed to his own "dimensional thinking". This was a TimeCube-like epistemology of Ilarion's creation, under which a circle can be a straight line at the same time, if you rotate it by 90 degrees, given by 90(n) so 90(45) would be a line at a 45-degree angle, that still had the properties of the original circle. It was also critical to how the UVGP worked, as it would possess "dimensional logic" and a "dimensional information crossover" or DFX. If you note that "information" begins with I and not with F, well, you're just not thinking dimensionally my friend.
Needless to say the UVGP never came to fruition, or else it exists in a higher dimension us linear thinkers just can't comprehend. Ilarion would then pivot Holomaxx into a reseller of computer and audiophile parts (thousand-dollar speaker wires and the like), as well as a bespoke web development company (I think they claimed Kazaa as a client). They are most famous, however, for unsuccessfully suing Microsoft and Yahoo! because the spam filters at those two providers filtered out correspondence originating from Holomaxx as spam. The case of Holomaxx Techs. v. Microsoft is cited in case law concerning the reach of the CAN-SPAM Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in terms of how much discretion a provider has in filtering communications going over their network that are, in the provider's determination, harmful.
I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that until I dived in and checked out the authorship, I wondered if Ilarion were involved with this desktop project. It sounds like the sort of thing he might get involved with, especially since SGI was synonymous with "kickass computing power" among gamers in the 90s. Thanks for the trip down 90s USENET memory lane, MaXX Desktop!
It's a shame that it's not (visibly) open source. There's so much that could be done at this point. The shambling corpse of SGI is dead enough that anything left of their legal department must be absolutely destroyed.
<< All the legacy code is under the SGI Special License Agreement and not available. Binaries are available as FREE-WARE for Linux (intel) platform. However we are in the process of changing the license to BSD 3-Clause, but it is complicated.
All new code under the MaXX Interactive Desktop Project is under a BSD 3-Clause License and is available at https://gitlab.com/maxxdesktop
Used to be called 5DWM.
Also CDE is now open source, being actively maintained, and is still the CDE you remember. Even on a vintage hosting platform https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Solarized Dark keeps CDE alive for me, sortof.
While I enjoyed 4dwm when I had a sgi, I am not convinced the desktop environment was that great, it did however have a very nice file manager, which I guess is 90% of a desktop environment, so perhaps it was pretty good after all.
The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/user-experience-ux/pa...
How did we have this at one point but now we have gnome and it’s single threaded , bad extensions take down the whole session desktop manager?
This is actually nice. Desktops were much less annoying back in the day.
I'm curious how you mean? I'm mainly on PopOs nowadays, and it seems largely fine? What are the main annoyances?
Rounded corners and huge paddings
I'll take filled rounded corners over the window border bulge atrocity seen in IRIX.
Also keep in mind IRIX (and most classic desktops) assumed 72 DPI displays rather than 96 DPI displays. That means when you view a screenshot or render them unadjusted they look 75% the size they did back in the day. Still plenty denser in many ways... just not as much as loading it up on a modern "96 DPI is 100%" screen would imply.
This. The very reason I use KDE (I have tried tiling wm's, and they are horrible if I use my drawing tablet, which I use a LOT), then customize it in a way to minimize wasted space (taskbar on the left, take out window borders padding, etc).
Then I go and enable compact look on firefox, take out a bunch of useless icons for things I don't use, and bam my 4K screen is able to accommodate all my work. Even though I do still use 125% DPI scale, not via KDE mind you, because I love eyes.
And even then, it still looks slick and modern. It's crazy how much space we waste with flat design on desktop. Crazyyy.
Funny, I'll have to look when back at a computer in a few days. I don't recall the padding being that bad. Granted... I do largely use it as an emacs machine. I'm sure that colors what I notice.
Well, they didn't serve you ads on the start menu...
They did (sort of). They were called demos and trials. But there was no DRM. FlexLM was easy to crack. The WWW was largely plaintext.
I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)
(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)
I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).
One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.
The link to "Installation Guides" https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/mid-v211-installation... at the bottom of the page next to the Slack/Facebook/Bluebird icons 404s :(
The correct link is https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/octane-v22-installati... as far as I can tell
This is great. Perhaps it's finally time for me to upgrade from my SGI Fuel to a Linux system running MaXX: https://triosdevelopers.com/~jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg
You still use your fuel? Nice.
What upgrades do you have? I only have a 500Mhz cpu, but i have 4 Gb and I put in an ssd. I also put in a modern power supply which makes it a little less loud.
Man that thing is loud
I'm curious how projects like this have been impacted by the Wayland work?
The file manager in this looks a lot like my beloved ROX-Filer. Would love to try this if I could install it on FreeBSD. I don't see it in a cursory glance at Ports.
FreeBSD support is listed on the site as a goal/feature (I've no idea which one), but I've no idea whether its aspirational or not:
> To run on multiple OS: Linux, FreeBSD and Windows11 WSL2.
The actual installation instructions seem to be for Linux kernels sadly.
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/octane-v22-installati...
It is indeed ROX, at least it was in the 2020 release.
Sadly this is closed source and only amd64 Linux binaries are available..
The name makes me think of Holomaxx Technologies (styled as holoMaXx technologies), the vanity DBA of one Ilarion Bilynsky, also known as SsZERO. SsZERO was a squirrely guy with an interesting USENET presence in the late nineties. At first he was a bit like the later Imari Stevenson: a spoiled, videogame-obsessed teenager whose confidence far exceeded his competence. He promised the Holomaxx Ultimate Video Game Project or UVGP, a kickass game console that would beat all others and even feature AGI, to everyone on rec.games.programmer and several other newsgroups, and became quite truculent, to the point of rudeness, when actual game devs replied with constructive criticism. He accused them all of "thinking linearly", as opposed to his own "dimensional thinking". This was a TimeCube-like epistemology of Ilarion's creation, under which a circle can be a straight line at the same time, if you rotate it by 90 degrees, given by 90(n) so 90(45) would be a line at a 45-degree angle, that still had the properties of the original circle. It was also critical to how the UVGP worked, as it would possess "dimensional logic" and a "dimensional information crossover" or DFX. If you note that "information" begins with I and not with F, well, you're just not thinking dimensionally my friend.
Needless to say the UVGP never came to fruition, or else it exists in a higher dimension us linear thinkers just can't comprehend. Ilarion would then pivot Holomaxx into a reseller of computer and audiophile parts (thousand-dollar speaker wires and the like), as well as a bespoke web development company (I think they claimed Kazaa as a client). They are most famous, however, for unsuccessfully suing Microsoft and Yahoo! because the spam filters at those two providers filtered out correspondence originating from Holomaxx as spam. The case of Holomaxx Techs. v. Microsoft is cited in case law concerning the reach of the CAN-SPAM Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in terms of how much discretion a provider has in filtering communications going over their network that are, in the provider's determination, harmful.
I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that until I dived in and checked out the authorship, I wondered if Ilarion were involved with this desktop project. It sounds like the sort of thing he might get involved with, especially since SGI was synonymous with "kickass computing power" among gamers in the 90s. Thanks for the trip down 90s USENET memory lane, MaXX Desktop!
It's a shame that it's not (visibly) open source. There's so much that could be done at this point. The shambling corpse of SGI is dead enough that anything left of their legal department must be absolutely destroyed.
<< All the legacy code is under the SGI Special License Agreement and not available. Binaries are available as FREE-WARE for Linux (intel) platform. However we are in the process of changing the license to BSD 3-Clause, but it is complicated.
All new code under the MaXX Interactive Desktop Project is under a BSD 3-Clause License and is available at https://gitlab.com/maxxdesktop
>>
Read more here:
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/licensing/page/sgi-sp...
Oh cool, I’ll come back after it’s BSD, this looks neat!