discoveries in a dusty garage

[Eric Dean Tribble <tribble>]

While searching for a notebook full of view/controller ideas (from
just after PARC), I ran across 50 pages of Viewers mail.  It includes
the horrors we went through to merge significantly different versions
of the Viewers code.  It also includes several revisions to a document
in which we made the changes explicit (in bold) so that we could parse
the changes and comments easily.  We ended up sending documents back
and forth because only the mail-system adequately supported fonts.  I
also found some old source-code:  boy did we try some strange things
(mostly me, I suspect).  One amusing extreme is a mouse-model object
that managed events through the dependency mechanism.  Another was a
wierd tiling system related to (but a major improvement over) the
ideas in the Blit terminal.  If I ever figure out the algorithms
again, I'll publish them...

I also ran across the notebook that I toured Europe with.  It's full
of ancient language design ideas, many of which were reinvented into
CommonLoops, of all things (plus a bunch of constraints stuff).  I'm
amused to discover that I didn't like a lot of the ideas even then
because they were so non-modular.

Wandering through my garage is a trip!

dean