David Rosenthal (one of the makers of NeWS) is married to Mark's widow Vicky, and he just emailed me that while cleaning out his office he ran across a couple of old VHS tapes labeled "Don's NeWS demos" that he's going to digitize for me! I hope they include a recording of Mark's SunView SDI game for which he implemented pie menus while snowed in at home with a Sun workstation during the January 22 1987 Blizzard of Discontent.
From: mark@markssun.cs.umd.edu (Mark Weiser)
Subject: pies in sunview
Date: January 24, 1987 at 02:12:37 GMT+1
To: don@mimsy.umd.edu
I used the snow to hack pies into sunview. It works now without walking menus.
Will have walking over th weekend.
-mark
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/c/mark-weiser/sdi/
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/c/mark-weiser/sdi/piemen...
I'd love to get this running again in a 68K Sun 3 emulator with SunOS 3.2!
Do we already know each other in real life, or should we begin? Say hi! Email is in my profile.
Here's another old email from Mark that I cherish, from just before he left UMD for PARC:
From: mark@markssun.cs.umd.edu (Mark Weiser)
Subject: paper
Date: February 25, 1987 at 06:24:52 GMT+1
To: don@gyre.umd.edu
Leave it (a) on my sun keyboard, (b) in my second floor mailbox,
(c) at the bottom of a pan of hash brownies. I'll be sure
to find it in any of those places.
-mark
I figured he was just any another software developer. Kind of an understatement, mom. Wish I still had those, but it was a school account all those decades ago.
I read the pie menu code and implemented it as a final project in Turbo PASCAL that year.