I actually had a very early book on RealBASIC (back in the Windows 3.0 days) and have always regretted not following up w/ it (went w/ HyperCard, then Runtime Revolution/LiveCode).
Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers.
Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.
RISC OS (1987) had built-in support for anti-aliased vector fonts, though they aren't shown in the screenshot. The OS was in ROM and had insufficient space for the actual fonts so they needed to be loaded from disk. This was fine if you had a hard disk but a pita with floppies.
I wish I could get the senior GNOME team to use RISC OS for a while. It is so very visible that GNOME >= 3.x is a Windows copy with things removed and re-arranged, because that's all anyone on board has seen or knows.
For me, my high-water mark for GUI experience/consistency was using Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS on an NCR-3125 when mobile, and a NeXT Cube (w/ a Wacom ArtZ) when at my desk --- nothing since has been as nice and consistent and reliable.
Reminds me of when I worked for a small shop which had the copier maintenance contract at a local college --- when something went wrong and wasn't properly addressed, my bosses found themselves being held to account with their own words from prior phone calls being quoted back to them verbatim --- which they were mystified by until I explained that the administrators had all come up from the clerical pool and knew shorthand.
>A spin metal finish is applied to the rounding and decimal selector levers, giving them a unique brilliance.
Naturally, they mean that the levers were faced off on a lathe, then maintaining that center, machined to size/shape --- nice touch given how the chrome plated plastic buttons on my PRS-505 e-book reader wore down after years of use.
The problem of course, is what about folks who have very specific interests/hobbies?
It's a long drive for me to get to a local shop and things which I am actually interested in working on rarely show up in the classes and so forth which they offer, and scheduling is awkward --- when my second favourite author came up on rotation for the book discussion at the local Barnes & Noble, I wasn't able to attend due to a prior commitment w/ my kids.
The pen tool is the big thing --- the ability to move a point when placing it using the control key while drawing w/ the pen tool is one thing I really miss, and in the context of the UI, the overall clean and straight-forward organization and layout, as well as supporting standard forms, so alt frees an off-curve node from association w/ the matching other, while shift constrains.
I see, that is indeed a highly requested feature (along with a general overhaul of the Node tool to make alternative curve methods less janky).
I'm been playing with Freehand, and the one thing that really stands out to me is the Object dialog. Current vector editors have similar designs, but none are as powerful and straightforward at the same time as Freehand's. The swatch workflow is also pretty rigid, and gives you a good imagination of what the color separations/result would look like.
The ability to do PostScript fills and strokes (and have them live-preview via Display PostScript) in Altsys Virtuoso was flat out _amazing_.
Ages ago, I once used the CMYK adjustment to get a rough preview of a multiple spot ink job à la Cerilica Truism (which you should have the person doing the CMYK stuff look into --- it allowed one to set paper stock colour options and then simulate multiple ink mixes, including spot colours --- also spot types, so there was only a single set of ink mixes, but if a spread had coated paper on one side and uncoated on the other, the appearance matched what one would have had to use two ink swatches for in other apps).
Also, Graphics Find and Replace is invaluable for working on complex files w/ many objects.
Well, yeah, the first time they made a really big push technology-wise --- making TRON-OS the default OS for their entire educational system --- the US FTC prevailed upon the State Department to inform them that such an endeavour would be viewed as anti-competitive.
I really wish that such things would instead be shared and celebrated and translated.
I did wonder, reading such a comment, whether it would be a hyperbole, but not only is it documented, it is way worse than that. The free market is only ever enforced in the direction that suits the US, and the vassal states get screwed.
Yeah, the demo where they showed multiple videos being played in separate windows on an 80186 was _amazing_ --- I _really_ wish that using TRON-OS for desktop use on commodity hardware was well-documented --- in particular, it would be _awesome_ for an rPi.
> The free market is only ever enforced in the direction that suits the US
I mean, come on. If it was free in both directions, the US might lose sometimes!!
Sigh. It's so sad. Stuff like this is why free-marketeers (and in particular libertarians) earn my ire. There is not a single economy in the world that is an actually free market. Capital can move fairly freely and labor not at all.
If nothing else, wouldn't access to training data be a hard limit here? I doubt one could get multiple companies to provide the complete history of their product board designs _and_ the background on why each change was made.
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