I've been thinking for awhile of writing something about the historical user interfaces that aren't much talked about (i.e. not the Alto -> Mac -> Windows lineage). In this instance, I decided to do a "tweet storm" instead of a blog post to see if that would be a more effective way to get the ideas into the world. As this is probably of interest to the community, I thought I should link to it here as well. The entrance to this particular Garden of Forking Paths: https://twitter.com/jackrusher/status/1300737671497691136?s=20

I love going back and looking at this stuff, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what a modern text-focused interface would be like. It feels like there’s a bunch of neat stuff we should be able to do now that just wouldn’t have been feasible at the time. It’s especially interesting to imagine using something like GPT-3 to get the interface to react to you much more naturally than it would otherwise.

@ibdknox Not on Lifestreams, but rather on a similar system in the context of a startup a long time ago. That was what led me to write the first purpose-built Semantic Web-style Triplestore. The sort of "global personal assistant" was scraping data from email, contacts, appointments, browsing, &c, and storing everything it learnt in a per user TripleStore to allow inferences, lookup, and so on. There was a temporal aspect to the data which allowed one to make "what was that website I visited about topic X within the last week?" sort of queries.

@Jack Rusher your “similar system” to lifestreams is an accurate description of at least four separate projects in this community—if you have any write ups or talks or posts about that experience anywhere lots of us would read or watch with interest!

The only surviving artifact from that project is a paper I delivered to the W3C in '02 or '03 about the TripleStore implementation. OTOH, my personal knowledge management system is basically a more advanced version of many of those ideas, and I already plan to do some show-and-tell about that when I can fence off enough time to do it properly.

Yes that would be interesting jack!

@Jack Rusher Fantastic, thanks for sharing! I'd love to hear your thoughts sometime on the RISC OS GUI which ran on the Acorn Archimedes machines in the 1990s, if you're familiar with it. I feel like there were a number of innovations there which are still not utilised today ...

Aside from the BBC Micro, the only systems from that lineage that I've had occasion to use were later NCOS-based machines from Oracle. What stood out to you about the UI? 🙂