I've been thinking about roads not taken lately, wondering whether we should revisit some of them...

What if windows could be any shape? It's nice when all the graphics are resolution-independent vector drawings, each running in their own threaded Postscript runtime too.

How about popup windows as persistent tear-offs instead of ephemeral floaters?

More here from a 1988 roundup of windowing interfaces by Brad Myers:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8f/4bf085ad89852f18d7da3aa1f8133151010d.pdf

Meanwhile, in France... Centaur was an interactive graphical programming environment written in #Lisp+ #Prolog featuring a built-in database, plus auto-generated structure editor, interpreter/debugger, and so on — for whatever language you want.
https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00075774/document

Recently, @Conaw asked me about old papers of interest to @RoamResearch. These 7 Issues for the Next Generation of Hypermedia Systems from the 80s should feel quite familiar. Hypermedia computation section very relevant to @sritchie's interests. /cc @mkvlr
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.124.1996&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Screenshot of Cedar, the other great interactive computing project at PARC (aside from Smalltalk and InterLisp-D), which shows a system of similar spirit built on a strongly typed ALGOL-like language with garbage collection and lightweight processes.

It included early work on editor ergonomics: "[U]sing Tioga as a program editor has several important benefits. First, viewing programs as formatted documents with common typographic conventions makes them easier to read and share."