There is so much beauty in those screenshots. The more technology advances, the more elegant old machines appear.

Even though the UI's are largely text, in some ways they make a greater effort to communicate with the user than many of today's "best practices."

In this case, it's both big things like the verbosity of the command responses, and little things like the beautiful font with its crossed sevens. More information above the page scroll? The top of the window gets a jagged edge like a torn piece of paper. (The anti-skeuomorphic crowd should avert its eyes.)

Also notice how technical information is expressed in human terms. How much memory is left? 11,334 "words." I know that a word can also be a technical term, and I don't know if that's the context being used here, but there were other programs of the era that translated bytes into human-thinkable words, so it's possible that this is doing the same.

Along those same lines, notice how an unknown or unexpected time is expressed as "forever" and not %NAN% like I see everywhere from airport status boards to AppleTV. It reminds me of AmigaDOS, which in directory listings could report file access as "Yesterday at 6pm" or "Tuesday at 1:35am." This could even be extended. My friend's A1000 showed file dates like "Last Christmas."

It's a kind of attention to detail that is missing in higher systems today, even though today's machines have far more horsepower to make it happen.

It reminds me of Emacs. Which seems approximately a virtualized Lisp machine. The pieces that are missing, like a typeface editor could probably be hacked up (and the reason it hasn't is that most people can't design better typefaces). Emacs calendar even has a human oriented interface. http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/old-gnu/Manuals/emacs-20.7/html_chapt...

Back when I was an heavy UNIX user, in search of nice IDE like features, I settled with XEmacs because the community was more open minded regarding the integration of graphical capabilities.

How is modern Emacs in that regard?

If you're running Mac, I suggest the railwaycat fork, which is basically GNU emacs plus some quality of life features that RMS is against like applescript/os integration, smooth scrolling and nice fonts

A list of differences: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/f3402395995bf70...

> Official repository: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/overview

> This is "Mac port" addition to GNU Emacs 26. This provides a native GUI support for Mac OS X 10.6 - macOS 10.15. Note that Emacs 23 and later already contain the official GUI support via the NS (Cocoa) port. So if it is good enough for you, then you don't need to try this.

> If you'd like to install with Homebrew, please

     $ brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport

  and then

     $ brew install emacs-mac

  if you using cask

     brew cask install emacs-mac or brew cask install emacs-mac-spacemacs-icon

 To disable this tap, please:

    $ brew untap railwaycat/emacsmacport