I love it when I discover – usually through people smarter than I – an operating system or graphical user interface I’ve never heard of. This time, we’ve got Bellcore MGR, as meticulously detailed by Nina Kalinina a few weeks ago.
I love old computers, and I enjoy looking at old user interfaces immensely. I could spend a whole evening on installing an old version of MS Word and playing with it: “Ah, look, how cute, they didn’t invent scrollbars just yet”. A special place in my heart is taken by user interfaces that were historically significant and yet fell into relative obscurity (like Windows 2 or BTRON).
This is why I absolutely had to try Bellcore MGR. An early windowing system (1984), it was made by the Bell Communications Research, and it looked like Plan 9’s older sister. The system was distributed over the Usenet, ported to every conceivable Unix-like system, including Minix, Linux and Coherent, and – eventually – mostly forgotten. The only two videos on YouTube that have something to do with MGR have a bit over 1000 views combined, and don’t really show it in the best light possible. And I think it’s a crying shame.
↫ Nina Kalinina
The reference to Plan 9 is apt, as MGR definitely seems to function almost exactly like Plan 9’s rio graphical user interface, including things like drawing a rectangle to open a new window. Rio is an acquired taste – to put it very mildly – and it seems MGR fits the same bill. There’s also $home movie, an entire video editor for MGR, which is honestly mind-blowing considering it’s running on a mere SPARCstation in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It has an incredibly unique UNIXy flavour:
If you don’t have 40 minutes to watch the tour, please do spend two minutes on this demo of the “$HOME MOVIE” system. It is “a suite of tools for the capture, editing and playback of window system sessions on a Sun Sparcstation” based on MGR. It is probably the most Unix way of making videos: the window manager dumps the rendering commands into a file, then the rendering commands can be altered with a set of small tools, some of which are in awk, and then these rendering commands can be packaged into a single demo.
↫ Nina Kalinina
Kalinina had to more or less reverse-engineer its unique video format, too, but in doing so managed to upload the original demonstration of $movie home, narrated by its creator and created in $movie home itself, to YouTube. Kalinina also created and uploaded a ready-made hard disk image of Debian 0.93 with Bellcore MGR preinstalled for use in Qemu and 86Box.
