It’s an excellent writeup with lots of information that was either unclear, incomplete or, in some instances, incorrect elsewhere. It’s well written and researched, and I definitely finished the article with several questions I’ve always wondered answered.
Anyone who’s curious about how early Windows works on the various generations of x86 should read this. Even if you think you know, there’s likely tidbits here you haven’t seen before.
Excellent article, kudos for the throughout research.
Fun fact, if you compare GUI of Windows 3 with certain UNIX systems like Sun Solaris and SGI Irix, you may notice some similarities, perhaps most obvious in window borders and title buttons:
Anyway, my point is, if it caught on as the standard GUI/application framework of Linux/BSDs, perhaps more companies would’ve been compelled to offer UNIX versions of their Windows software, and the entire desktop market would’ve evolved differently.
Soooo I wanna call out that the title and first sentence of this article:
It is common knowledge that Final Fantasy could have been the “final” game for the studio, the first and the last in the series.
So like…. yes but also that’s not extraordinary. If the game flopped, the company would surely not have made a sequel, but that’s true of virtually any commercial project. They were doing not great before it came out too, so yeah, a flop might have spelled the end of the company as well, but again, that’s not that extraordinary, a lot of companies teeter on the edge of viability.
The story goes they called it “Final Fantasy” because it was the company’s last chance at living the dream but, the creator said that he just liked the way the initials “FF” sounded and thus was looking at any adjective that started with F, and his first idea of “Fighting” was rejected over a potential trademark conflict. He went with Final in part because he, creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, was personally thinking about quitting his job when it was done, even if the company was doing fine, but the primary motivation was just starting with the letter F. Wikipedia has some references for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_(video_game)#Title (of course worth noting that people’s recollections change over the years, and many of those interviews from a long time after the decision was made, but we know they did consider “Fighting” contemporaneously so that gives credence to the later accounts).
So I wouldn’t say the first sentence is false per se, but I would say it is a myth, in the dictionary sense of “A popular belief or story that has become associated with a person, institution, or occurrence, especially one considered to illustrate a cultural ideal. “ moreso than because it accurately shows what the people were thinking at the time they made the decision.
Well we got that in the end with every smartphone around. Even if the icon of what I am after is well-known, right in front of me in the middle of the screen, I still reach for the search bar to actually find it now.
Shortcuts to documents or applications is another lineage, this is just running applications that are minimized, so basically what’s right next to the trash bin on the right side of the current MacOS Dock if you minimize windows.
IIRC early X11 window managers like twm did it the same way.
Given that these are only attached to running processes, it would be very hard to cover an early Windows desktop with those icons, you’d probably be happy if you have half a dozen of them…
The XIconifyWindow() function sends a WM_CHANGE_STATE ClientMessage event with a format of 32 and a first data element of IconicState (as described in section 4.1.4 of the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual)
The reference there is:
IconicState - The client’s top-level window is iconic (whatever that means for this window manager). The client can assume that its top-level window is not viewable, its icon_window (if any) will be viewable and, failing that, its icon_pixmap (if any) or its WM_ICON_NAME will be displayed.
It’s an excellent writeup with lots of information that was either unclear, incomplete or, in some instances, incorrect elsewhere. It’s well written and researched, and I definitely finished the article with several questions I’ve always wondered answered.
Anyone who’s curious about how early Windows works on the various generations of x86 should read this. Even if you think you know, there’s likely tidbits here you haven’t seen before.
The piece mentions the GDI as being as being a variant of the GKS. From memory, it actually struck me that the GEM VDI was a better match to that.
VDI itself being a progression from the DR GSX, which was a GKS variant.
Excellent article, kudos for the throughout research.
Fun fact, if you compare GUI of Windows 3 with certain UNIX systems like Sun Solaris and SGI Irix, you may notice some similarities, perhaps most obvious in window borders and title buttons:
That’s because the entire visual style of Motif (but not the API) was contributed by Microsoft, and based on their presentation manager:
Motif was supposed to be the standard GUI style across different UNIX systems. Sadly Linux developers, instead of building upon it, had other ideas.
The legacy is still maintained though by some niche projects, for example EMWM - https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
Sadly, free software developers were forbidden from building upon it.
I’m not a lawyer, OSF/Motif was obviously proprietary, but what about https://lesstif.sourceforge.net/?
Exactly, that’s a clone, they had to re-do it from scratch because they couldn’t build upon Motif.
Well, the main parts of Motif are the style guide and the API. LessTif’s code was written from scratch, but it was very much built upon Motif.
http://www.opengroup.org/motif/motif.data.sheet.htm
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1123
Anyway, my point is, if it caught on as the standard GUI/application framework of Linux/BSDs, perhaps more companies would’ve been compelled to offer UNIX versions of their Windows software, and the entire desktop market would’ve evolved differently.
Soooo I wanna call out that the title and first sentence of this article:
So like…. yes but also that’s not extraordinary. If the game flopped, the company would surely not have made a sequel, but that’s true of virtually any commercial project. They were doing not great before it came out too, so yeah, a flop might have spelled the end of the company as well, but again, that’s not that extraordinary, a lot of companies teeter on the edge of viability.
The story goes they called it “Final Fantasy” because it was the company’s last chance at living the dream but, the creator said that he just liked the way the initials “FF” sounded and thus was looking at any adjective that started with F, and his first idea of “Fighting” was rejected over a potential trademark conflict. He went with Final in part because he, creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, was personally thinking about quitting his job when it was done, even if the company was doing fine, but the primary motivation was just starting with the letter F. Wikipedia has some references for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_(video_game)#Title (of course worth noting that people’s recollections change over the years, and many of those interviews from a long time after the decision was made, but we know they did consider “Fighting” contemporaneously so that gives credence to the later accounts).
So I wouldn’t say the first sentence is false per se, but I would say it is a myth, in the dictionary sense of “A popular belief or story that has become associated with a person, institution, or occurrence, especially one considered to illustrate a cultural ideal. “ moreso than because it accurately shows what the people were thinking at the time they made the decision.
Btw. if you want to play around with Windows 2, there is a Javascript-based PC emulator available at https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows2 .
Ahh, the start of the “cover my Desktop with shortcuts” ridiculousness.
I think this would be Xerox Star (1981), and the whole idea of a “desktop” was to be covered with files and folders - https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/retrospect/
Well we got that in the end with every smartphone around. Even if the icon of what I am after is well-known, right in front of me in the middle of the screen, I still reach for the search bar to actually find it now.
Shortcuts to documents or applications is another lineage, this is just running applications that are minimized, so basically what’s right next to the trash bin on the right side of the current MacOS Dock if you minimize windows. IIRC early X11 window managers like twm did it the same way.
Given that these are only attached to running processes, it would be very hard to cover an early Windows desktop with those icons, you’d probably be happy if you have half a dozen of them…
Fun fact, the word “iconfiy” is still used for what we mostly call “minimized” to this day in some of the specs and sources:
https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/ICC/client-to-window-manager/XIconifyWindow.html
The reference there is:
And it carries on into newer specs too:
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/ar01s05.html
Of course, many of us do still keep the icons visible on our taskbars, so the name isn’t wrong, but it does seem weird if you don’t know this history.