

Value Of Windowing Is Questioned (1984) - monort
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing-is-questioned.html

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AshleysBrain
Interesting perspective, but 1984 machines would have all been incredibly
tightly resource-constrained with very low resolution screens, making it
difficult to even display two windows at once. Fair enough to question it in
1984 but times have changed!

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rwmj
Except on tablets of course, where "single app visible at a time" is common.

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sparkie
Probably Gnome3 soon too, the way it appears to be heading.

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keithpeter
Oddly enough, I use almost all windows in maximised mode on this small old
laptop. That is with Gnome 3 and/or MATE. Just seems to make more sense.

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striking
And that is why I am a happy customer of dwm
([http://dwm.suckless.org/](http://dwm.suckless.org/))

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chriswarbo
Indeed, the article was focusing on a false dichotomy: either you must exit
one application before using another (no windows), or your applications must
be relegated to unusably small fractions of the screen (windows).

If you don't like either option, there's a third choice: run multiple
applications, only show one at a time and allow fast switching between them.

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Jezparov
Anyone remember DESQview? It allowed you to run multiple fullscreen text mode
applications and switch between them by double-tapping the alt key. I used to
run Telix and Wordperfect at the same time and could still get a DOS prompt if
I needed one.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview)

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chipsy
in some ways the article was right at the time. The first Windows was pretty
bad, and so was the second.

Whether windows, tiles, or single screen is better still comes up, but we've
all come to expect multitasking.

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digi_owl
This article seems to equate windowing with multitasking (in the computing
sense, not the workflow sense).

