Jos Dreesen
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2012–2025
4:54 · 2.5K views · Jul 3, 2012
A silent demo of the ETH Lilith Modula-2 workstation running its Comdex demo program, captured from the Emulith emulator.
Linked in threads on early workstations and Modula-2 as a quick look at the Lilith's windowed interface.
3 comments from Hacker News
It used to be a serious language back in the day (up to early 90's). The Lillith operating system was written in it. A fully working operating system with what could be considered a kind of GUI environment on those days. It was used at Zurich's university and a few others around the world. You can have a look at it here: this video (Lilith Comdex Demo) [LINK] (Emulator) [LINK] (Some background history) There were a few companies selling commercial Modula-2 compilers like Garden's Point and Excelsior. There was a UNIX system that had it as part of their compiler suite, I cannot remember which one now. It failed to fully replace Pascal, because eventually Mac/Turbo Pascal came along and most Pascal compilers had extensions that made them compatible with Mac/Turbo Pascal. Since those Pascal extensions were similar to what Modula-2 offered and many companies already had an investment in Pascal code, many kept using Pascal instead of moving into Modula-2. When UNIX gained much of the space in the enterprise world, C was the language to use if you didn't want to justify why you were using something else, so that was like the final nail in Modula-2's coffin. It is very hard for a systems programming language to gain market share if it isn't the official language used by the operating system's vendor. The language is quite powerful, when compared with C, with the added benefit of proper modules, strings and arrays. Not the pointer everywhere from C which leads to security exploits by de
Ah, early GUIs. For comparison, take a look at Xerox' Cedar and Smalltalk, or Wirth's Lillith and Oberon, all from pretty much the same era. The Lilith systems are often overlooked. They predate the Blit, are programmed in Modula-2, translated to bytecode. Oberon is a bit more well-known, but still not as much as both the language and the OS deserve. Lilith demo video: this video Some screenshots & pics: [LINK] Cedar demo: [LINK] (Smalltalk and Oberon are a bit easier to find and more well-known anyway)
An Emulith page[1] has a Lilith hardware manual[2]. There's a brief Comdex Emulith demo.[3] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] (pdf; 20 MB) [3] this video