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I had totally forgotten about WAIS, a pre-web information service architecture that was, like all other such schemes, swallowed whole by HTTP/HTML. It even had a URL scheme which I’m pretty sure I resolved a few times via Lynx.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
Interesting stuff, and apparently an interesting guy. This DataCase app looks great - wish I had something similar on my *nix box today! Lots of "note taker" apps out there, but this one was "databasier", which is to my liking.
" Datacase is a sort-of frontend to FreeWAIS. It uses the wais indexing engine to build indexes of data you give to Datacase. I build this tool out of my growing need to get access to little data sniplets fast. Often I encounter something nice, funny, important, etc. in the news or in the web. Now with Datacase storing this information is easy: highlight it in any application or terminal window, press the ALT-shortkey, give it a nick name (Datacase opens a dialog for check-in) and that was it. The index is rebuilded automatically in a few seconds, regardless how many data is in the database.
Datacase provides fast full text retrieval and understands natural english as query language. Data is presented in a special retrieval window that can highlight certain portions of text very fast."
Perhaps too common to list, but this shouldn't be missing on any list of historic Next software:
> any NS/OS system with Public Window Server turned on is securitywise equivalent to one which has exported all filesystems by NFS public read/write.
Thats Cisco level security right there.
My favorite was the Postscript NFS server that could be launched by looking at an EPS sent via E-Mail, for example.
NeXT later plugged that particular hole...
The Datacase screenshot, https://www.wizards.de/~frank/DatacaseScreen.gif, shows something very interesting near the lower-left: the 3rd icon is labeled Konsole!!
This was 1996. Did KDE exist then?
Seems KDE was founded in October 1996 (according to Wikipedia), not sure what this means about the age of Konsole.
The first Konsole commit on git has a Changelog which goes back to April 1998, but that already has version number 0.8.6 (https://cgit.kde.org/konsole.git/diff/ChangeLog?id=d8f741181... ), so it's not implausible that you would have a Konsole in 1996 or shortly after.
Wow, cool. Thanks for doing the digging!
For some time I've wanted to fish out early builds of popular/established furniture like KDE and GNOME to track how they've developed over the years. There are old screenshots online and that gets 99% there but being able to leave a trail of functioning VMs in my wake would be cool.
The desktop in this screenshot is localized to German, hence "Konsole" instead of "console". Also, "Okt" instead of "Oct" as calendar month.
Facepalm Yup, of course, that would be it.
Perhaps "NextStep" in this screenshot is being simulated using Linux/Gnustep/WindowMaker?
windowmaker has a different icon (although that could be changed) but more so the icon at the bottom to the left of the recycling bin, is fiend, an app that allowed you to put dock icons everywhere on the screen and supported virtual desktops of some form, if i remember correctly.
since windowmaker didn't implement the dock in the same way, porting fiend didn't make much sense. instead, it features a clip that includes desktop switching in its icon. the GWorkspace implemention for GNUstep also adds fiend features right in, and looks slightly different, so it is quite unlikely that this is anything but a genuine NeXTStep desktop.
in 1996 NeXTStep was still in active use and development and also available for intel PCs. (the last release was 1997. it was supported until 2002) (myself, i was using NeXT workstations until 2005)
greetings, eMBee.
I can't rule it out. One the one hand it's a GIF, on the other hand the server's saying it was last modified in 2012.
I'd find an app like Talker to be useful still.