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▲Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environmentgithub.com
99 points by kim_rutherford 15 hours ago | 14 comments
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kristopolous 13 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView

It'd be interesting to try this concept again on the wildly different computers we have now compared to 40 years ago.

4k monitors, high speed networks, dozens of cores, things are significantly different - might open some wildly exciting and new possibilities

skissane 13 hours ago [-]
Also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows

Although I’ve never succeeded in locating a copy of the spec, any implementations, even a screenshot… would be great if any of them turned up some day

eschaton 11 hours ago [-]
This should have enough to build either an emulator or a window manager.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...

skissane 8 hours ago [-]
Also there is a firmware dump for the HP 700/70 which implemented it: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/700/HP_700_70_C1093/

Likewise for the Televideo 995-65: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/

nickdothutton 1 hours ago [-]
Got hold of a free copy of this as a student, on underpowered PCs at college and it was a superpower.
boznz 10 hours ago [-]
and Borland Turbovision
jd3 11 hours ago [-]
I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021

kristopolous 10 hours ago [-]
I got Desqview/X running about 25 years ago on some Everex. An X Terminal that ran win16 software - Useless but fascinating.

IIRC there was some additional minimal runtime stuff like perl/awk/sed that came with it kinda like MinGW later on

johng 10 hours ago [-]
Same experience here. It blew my mind but it wasn't really useable.
ivolimmen 8 hours ago [-]
... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS
snvzz 3 hours ago [-]
Last I checked (easily been a decade) it had a major limitation in not supporting Unicode.

I wonder if this was ever resolved.

JdeBP 23 minutes ago [-]
It seems to have supported UTF-8 for at least a decade. Although it went the full-on ECMA-35 route of making that an optional switchable character set.

There was an issue back in 2016 where, ironically, it was coming up in Latin-1 mode with everything else around it talking UTF-8, and there have been other similar impedance mis-matches over the years. But they seem to hinge on it actually having UTF-8 support.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/4

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8

However: There was no 256 colours support as of 2021.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/30

And in some places it even required IBM code page 437.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/22

And some of the doco seems to have never been incorporated.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/100

matt3210 8 hours ago [-]
Peak UI for sure!
behnamoh 8 hours ago [-]
Does it support Liquid Glass? :')