
MaXX Interactive Desktop: A Re-Implementation of the IRIX Interactive Desktop - rbanffy
https://maxxinteractive.com/
======
peatmoss
I poked around on an old Indy at a vintage computer show a couple years back,
and the main takeaway I had was, “holy crap the UI elements feel
instantaneous.”

I know it’s been posted here many times about how computers have become
perceptually slow, but that Indy after a couple minutes of poking around
really drove the point home in a way that no numbers ever could.

Computers have gained a lot, for sure, but they’ve also lost a lot. I wonder
if it’s even possible to make a modern computer fast in a way that feels fast
again.

~~~
whoopdedo
There was a revelation a while back that instantaneous UX can be detrimental.
If the action occurs so quickly that the users can't see it happening, they
have a tendency to assume it didn't happen. Programmers had to introduce
intentional latency through elements such as the file copy animation.

~~~
derefr
That was indeed a while back—we had fewer ways to communicate change back
then. Given all the fancy technologies in a modern laptop/mobile device, I
wonder how much more we could tell the user _without_ slowing down to give
visual feedback—instead communicating by haptic and/or 3D-audio feedback after
the fact (the same way that e.g. macOS plays a sound effect after-the-fact
when you put something in the Trash—but with a procedurally-synthesized
soundscape, rather than the static "it went to the bottom-right.")

~~~
bonestormii_
Oooo. So I think this is a terrible idea for most people, but something I
would personally love. I'm a big fan of 3 monitors in a slight "wrapping"
formation, but there are times when some event occurs on a screen which is
literally behind me if I'm looking at one of the far monitors. It would be so
cool to have 3D audio feedback that lets you calibrate to the layout of your
monitors.

------
octorian
I actually have two SGI machines kicking around (an Indigo2 and an Octane2),
and I really wish I had a better idea of what to do with them beyond poking
around at the desktop for 10 minutes.

One big problem with all these old "workstation" computers, is that while us
hobbyists still have our ways of getting the OS installed... The actual
applications people ran on them almost seem lost to time. When software is so
unbelievably expensive during its heyday, it tends to not make the jump over
to "abandonware" repositories once its time has passed. This unfortunately
makes demos of these old machines far more boring than demos of old PCs.

~~~
nix23
Slap OpenBSD or NetBSD on it.

~~~
asveikau
I have some old machines too, and that thought occurs. But that is also
slightly boring. What can I do on those that I can't do on amd64 at higher
speeds?

~~~
nix23
Well nothing, i see it to preserve a bit of history, turn it on once in a
while, maybe help netbsd to support it (patch etc) and port stuff over.

~~~
asveikau
Porting and hacking on low level stuff is probably the most interesting thing
I can think of for it. That is probably why I keep the machines around. In
practice though I hardly have the time to use them.

~~~
rbanffy
But then they'll be nothing more than awkward PCs running software in slow
motion.

~~~
asveikau
Porting software to unexpected environments sometimes exposes legit bugs and
validates your design. I always like to get software I write working in
unusual configurations. It tests my assumptions and often results in something
sturdier.

~~~
rbanffy
Indeed. Also, if it runs well on a 25 year old machine, it'll probably run
well on a modern computer a thousand times faster ;-)

I always recommend developers to get the cheapest possible laptop for testing.

~~~
nix23
It has nothing todo with speed, but finding bug's.

>I always recommend developers to get the cheapest possible laptop for
testing.

Yeah that is stupid, until you are the developer of that Laptop, or your dev's
have too much time, take trusty Hardware and Down-clock it if you need to (you
don't want to debug cheap hardware).

~~~
rbanffy
If you want to find bugs in your code that arise from assumptions about
machine architecture, you can use emulators. You don't need an ancient MIPS
machine for that, unless you want to find bugs on code that supports long
obsolete hardware. And you can emulate architectures far weirder than MIPS
with that.

And you _should_ test on slow and unreliable hardware. You'd be surprised, for
instance, how frequently servers fail to boot because the BMC ignored your
instructions.

~~~
nix23
>from assumptions about machine architecture, you can use emulators

That is exactly NOT true, since there is no 100% correct emulation around,
think of x64 emulation with integrated Meltdown, if you don't know about
meltdown your emulation has no implementation for it.

Look you made a perfect counterargument, using unreliable hardware...with your
words you could just test it with unreliable emulation ;)

>unreliable hardware... how frequently servers

Wait...server's and unreliable do not match together...and then the BMC
argument..sound's bit crazy to me.

~~~
rbanffy
It did sound crazy to me too, before I saw it happen a couple times. Or "not
happen" would be a better description.

------
Erlich_Bachman
Can someone please explain what are the main hypothetical advantages of this
desktop environment? Even the article itself does a poor job of explaining
this, it seems to assume that the reader already knows what IRIX/whatever is,
and why did (do?) people use it over other environments?

~~~
rbanffy
You can check [https://maxxinteractive.com/](https://maxxinteractive.com/) for
more information.

~~~
xvector
It doesn’t really help. What is SGI? What makes MaXX better than other
desktops today? The page assumes too much background and doesn’t really do
anything to convince a new reader.

That said the desktop looks amazing! Love the theme.

~~~
goatinaboat
_What is SGI?_

Seeing this question asked makes me sad. If you are browsing this on Linux
then you're probably using code descended from Netscape which was developed by
a guy called Zawinski on an SGI Indy.

Or if you have seen a movie, then all the special effects are descended from
work done on SGI machines.

If you have fuel in your car, the oil field was probably originally found
after running seismic analysis on an SGI. They were famous for their movie
work but Oil & Gas was actually a far bigger market for them.

If you have flown anywhere, the pilot was trained on a simulator descended
from technology developed by SGI.

If you program C++ then STL comes from SGI. As does the XFS filesystem.

If you have seen a weather forecast on TV, that probably was done on a Cray,
who for a while were owned by SGI and who developed a lot of their tech. Many
TV stations used SGIs to render the forecast on the green screen behind the
presenter too.

If you have played Nintendo, the MIPS processor in it was developed by SGI. If
you play games on PC, OpenGL was developed by SGI.

They were once one of the most influential computing companies in the world.
Now they are merely a legend, and a fading one at that :-(

~~~
ajmarsh
Most of the early image guided surgery systems were powered by SGI's as well.

~~~
nix23
And dont forget Jurassic park:

[http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html](http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html)

------
tpmx
Nostalgia:

At my first software development job in the mid 90s, the "cool" basement room
with all of the smart/weird developers in it had a a mix of Sun SPARCstation
10/20 and Sun Ultra 1 workstations.

There was also this one weird SGI O2 they had just bought to port their
software to the IRIX platform, but noone wanted really wanted to use it,
because of IRIX. So I picked that workstation, just to be in that room.
Smartest decision of my life - what I learned in there defined my career.

The Irix Interactive Desktop (based on Motif) felt so incredibly responsive on
the O2, compared to Motif/CDE on the Sun workstations. It was almost BeOS-like
in that regard. It was the little touches that mattered. A random example: the
CPU usage monitor updated at like 10-20 Hz, instead of like 1 Hz on the Sun
workstations.

Not that anyone really used CDE in normal work - other window managers were
far more efficient. I ended up using
[http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html](http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html)
on this O2.

------
jasoneckert
IRIX was my favourite UNIX flavour in the 1990s. As a result, I was tempted to
try MaXX out after reading this post for purely nostalgic reasons. I keep an
SGI Fuel in my basement (running IRIX 6.5.30 and everything from Nekochan) for
when I need a nostalgia kick.

However, after thinking about whether I'd actually use MaXX over GNOME for a
few minutes, I decided that there was no compelling reason to do so other than
nostalgia.

Has anyone tried this out and decided to use it as their daily desktop? If so,
I'm interested to hear your experiences and rationale. Cheers!

~~~
easygenes
Never used IRIX, but I genuinely really like the icon set in that first
screenshot. Also, SGI Screen is still one of my favorite fixed width fonts.

Also I think FVWM was heavily inspired from this, and I’ve used that as a very
efficient UI over VNC (gradients, images, rounded corners, etc. are expensive
in terms of bandwidth. The minimalist aesthetic of this interface conveys a
lot of structure in little data).

~~~
hakfoo
FVWM was more a mwm (Motif) clone. It dates to the '90s, back before OpenMotif
or Lesstif and having something with even that aesthetic was a step up.

------
cygned
I had an internship at an IBM reseller and consultancy couple years back. When
we were at a client’s after finishing a project, they showed me their basement
full of decommissioned computers and they let me take one home for free. I
picked an SGI Indigo2, purple version, running IRIX. I had no idea what to do
with it, so I played around for a couple of months and then made the mistake
of throwing it away. (That still bugs me). I still love the interface and the
way things were organized in the system, the file manager in particular. It
ran nedit as editor and I used that on Linux for a couple of years going on.
Nostalgia...

edit: Remembering, I got the machine with original SGI keyboard, mouse and
screen.

~~~
bluedino
I had a purple one and a green one! I’d play Doom (which didn’t use the 3D
hardware), played around with a few of the OpenGL demos, barely surged the
internet with the ancient version of Netscape, then didn’t do much else
because I didn’t have the CD’s that came with it or the knowledge to try and
build anything else.

------
teleforce
From reading the comments it seems this effort is more on the nostalgic
sentiment for reliving the IRIX desktop.

I'm more interested on reliving the CEDAR/Tioga interactive desktop
environment pioneered by the Xerox R&D team back in 1980s/1990s for their in-
house productivity tools [1]. The system still have some productivity enabling
features that are still not widely used as of now. Xerox also managed to port
the system to SunOS at the time.

Anyone aware of any effort or clone that can enable CEDAR/Tioga to run on or
emulated Linux?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22375449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22375449)

~~~
rbanffy
I can work from an IRIX desktop (or CDE, or OpenWindows, even on original
hardware), but I'm not sure I could work on any of these environments.

------
PaulHoule
I remember a prof who bought a purple SRI workstation that didnt have enough
RAM, he plugged into the Ethernet, couldn't get work done with it, left it
plugged in anyway.

I found out two years later that the root password was the empty string.

Then there was the time I went to Syracuse for the first conference on Java
for scientific computing and Geoff Fox had two identical twins from eastern
Europe to run a demo on two workstations hooked up to a big SGI computer
unsuccessfully which Geoff answer with 'never buy a gigabyte of cheap RAM'.

------
pjmlp
This brings back memories back in the early days of OpenGL and ISO C++ ongoing
standardization I spent quite some time reading SGI documentation.

For the youngsters, back when we had multiple prototypes of Stepanov's work
for the C++ STL library, SGI was one of the companies hosting the
documentation.

And then there was OpenGL, while ARB was formed in the process to standardize
IrisGL into OpenGL, reading the documentation from the source was much better.

~~~
nabla9
And there was WRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) and SGI was trying to
make that happen.

~~~
p_l
I remember using workable 3D thanks to VRML, on the web, circa around
1999-2000 to play with a virtual tour of the ISS.

I think it worked remarkably fast even on 56k connection, and definitely
worked fast on 512kbit that became available around that time.

------
dilandau
Looks pretty cool. There is interest in CDE as well lately, it seems (NsCDE as
well as CDE proper).

Beyond aesthetic reasons, it's hard to understand when one would really use
these for daily driving. Anyone using this or CDE able to offer insight?

~~~
rbanffy
How long does CDE to start on a modern workstation?

~~~
danmg
CDE started basically instantly on 90s workstations after login.

~~~
rbanffy
I think it takes a couple seconds on my Netra 1. Certainly not instantaneous.

------
dazzawazza
Reminds me of many months programming and learning the N64 before the PC based
devkits were available.

~~~
rbanffy
Around 2000 or so Dell screwed up the delivery of a couple desktops right
after I was hired. I ended up using an O2 to read my email, read documentation
and to get up to speed with our tech stacks. I used it for about a month. Very
nice machine, exceedingly responsive.

------
Lammy
Is that ROX-Filer I see in the screenshot? :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop)

------
ris
"I know this! It's UNIX!"

------
ptx
The website has instructions for building on FreeBSD, but how does that square
with the license agreement that "permits The MaXX Desktop to be deployed and
executed ONLY on the following Linux platforms; x86, x86-64 and IA-64"?

(And there won't be an ARM version, I guess?)

------
bonaldi
This is extremely well done; I thought I was looking at Irix until I spotted
the Slack icon. (My god, the thought of that on the Indy; it would have
crippled it for weeks).

I wonder if it has the Twilight background

------
Keyframe
I had luck to pretty much grew up around SGI and Amigas. This is awesome to
see, we'll see how useful from day to day though compared to GNOME.

------
icedchai
Neat! I have an SGI system in my collection (an O2 workstation.) Back in the
90's, I had an SGI Indy on my desk. Those systems were fasttttt...

------
als0
Does anyone know what's the best way to try out an original IRIX system? Aside
from buying an Indigo and disks.

~~~
opencl
There's a guide for setting up IRIX emulation on MAME at
[https://sgi.neocities.org/](https://sgi.neocities.org/)

Unfortunately it's pretty slow.

------
betimsl
What a great way to preserve old UIs that one would rarely experience by other
ways :)

------
sabujp
irix was my first unix that i really cut my teeth on

------
joubert
Italics. :-/

------
op03
Don't get cheap on me, Dodgson!

