I promised to share a bit more about VisiOn operating system, didn't I?

[nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt]

I promised to share a bit more about VisiOn operating system, didn't I?

VisiCorp Visi On (or Visi-On, or VisiOn) was an early multi-tasking graphical operating system for IBM PC from 1983, released before Windows and Mac, and announced before Apple Lisa.

For those who didn't see me previously posting about it, I'm slowly working on reverse-engineering it for the purpose of home-brewing. https://git.sr.ht/~nkali/vision-sdk

But this is going to be something different! Just a review of interesting interface quirks in this early UI. You can briefly see the host OS mouse, apologies for that.

One immediately obvious thing here is "hourglass" icon. Some believe that it might have been the first OS to use hourglass mouse icon.

🧵

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@nina_kali_nina Interlisp-D has provided a hourglass pointer icon since its earliest releases betwen the late 1970s and the early 1980s. I don't know when the first Interlisp-D version came out and whether it already had the icon but the system's display facilities didn't change much since then.

The 1983 edition of the Interlisp Reference Manual mentioned the hourglass icon, see WAITINGCURSOR here:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference_Manual_Oct_1983.pdf#page=549

[nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt]

@amoroso thanks for the important context! VisiOn was developed since 1981, and afaik in the December 1982 demo there was a hourglass icon already. I see Xerox Star had it by 1982, so it's definitely not the earliest hourglass icon, but one of the first ones, and maybe the first one on PC

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@nina_kali_nina You're welcome, it's an interesting corner of user interface history. I've asked to some of the original Interlisp-D developers.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@nina_kali_nina This is the hourglass icon of Interlisp-D from a later edition of the Interlisp Reference Manual.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@nina_kali_nina The Mesa environment and the Laurel email client of Xerox Alto provided an hourglass icon in the late 1970s and likely earlier:

https://groups.google.com/g/lispcore/c/Ef99B2R45yY/m/X3mDAsu2AAAJ