[philipswood]

For context: keep in mind that the personal computer that Wirth and team built for ETH Zurich, project Oberon, was graphical, but eschewed overlapping windows for a paned interface and didn't buy into the skeuomorphic desktop WIMP metaphor.

So "arbitrarily overlapping windows" and "fancy icons" as "cute but not essential" may be telling, but is probably not telling what you thing it does.

[fisensee]

I agree, taking these quotes out of its time context is a bit silly but then again this is the implied intention of posting this here, right? Most people reading this and posting a comment will not be talking about the state of software in 1995 but today, using the article to show that the things described in it are still true/got worse. My comment itself was more of a quick reaction to the general sentiment in the comment section than a serious critic of the article itself.

Since I'm a huge fan of tiling windows managers and spend a lot of my time in terminal emulators as a power user I believe to understand his vision about computer usage and have a lot of admiration for what he and his colleagues were working on. But for the general population I believe he did not have the "right" idea (easy to say with almost 30 years of hindsight).

[badsectoracula]

It also should be noted that Oberon's UI (which you can try out by downloading the emulator from here[0]) might be an initial culture shock if you are used to a Windows-like interface, but when you learn how it works it actually is both very powerful and very consistent - which helps into usability since everything works the same way.

AFAIK Oberon was actually used by "regular people" at ETH Zurich for a long time.

(and a lot of people ran and still run their programs maximized anyway)

[0] http://www.projectoberon.com/

[Koshkin]

Mouse chording, ouch. (I firmly believe it is the worst idea in the history of personal computing.)

[philipswood]

Wasn't too bad to use.

Biggest gripe was finding a PC with a 3-buttoned mouse in the uni computer lab when it was full.

Being able to select, copy, paste and execute without touching a keyboard was cool.

(We used it a bit in a 3rd year computer science OS course)

[pjmlp]

People that worship the ACME editor might be of different point of view.

[nine_k]

Was the computer science professor Niklaus Wirth, a creator of several programming languages, a layman user of personal computers?

Why did Amiga, the series of computers beloved by artists and musicians, have overlapping windows and colorful icons?

[zozbot234]

> Why did Amiga, the series of computers beloved by artists and musicians, have overlapping windows and colorful icons?

To be fair, these things were computationally intensive at the time. The Amiga had a hardware blitter and very good color capabilities, so it could afford to show them off.

[nine_k]

The creators of Amiga introduced them, and added hardware support to make it performant. The only thing which felt sluggish in an Amiga was the floppy disk.

Likely these creators understood the importance of overlapping, draggable, resizeable windows for the audience, and the audience indeed enjoyed them. Same thing with the classic Mac.

If you tried a tiling WM, you realize that it requires learning, tweaking, and discipline. Those are expensive qualities to require from users; one should ask for limited amounts of them.

[zozbot234]

Overlapping windows also require learning and discipline, perhaps more so than tiled screen splits. We are just more used to the former than the latter.

[jhgb]

Amiga may have had some overlapping windows within a screen but it also had multiple screens with significantly restricted arrangement options, if memory serves me right.