Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Eazel, Nautilus and GNOME 1.4

I’m a big fan of Bill Atkinson’s work on the original Macintosh, in particular QuickDraw and MacPaint. Today I heard the news that he has pancreatic cancer:

On October first, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Because of vascular involvement, surgery is not possible. I am taking weekly chemo treatments to shrink the tumor before surgical resection. I am tolerating the chemo pretty well, and I am in good spirits. Every day I make a point of getting out in the sun and walking with Cai and Poppy.

I wish him well with his fight with cancer.

A related post from Dr. Drang on Mastodon led me to re-read a great story on folklore.org about Bill, written by Andy Hertzfeld:

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

This lead to a Wikipedia rabbit hole that started with Andy and Bill co-founding General Magic along with Marc Porat, and concluded with me discovering that the Nautilus file manager used in GNOME was created by Eazel, a company Andy Hertzfeld founded after General Magic. Eazel didn’t succeed, but as it laid off most of its 75 employees, 1.0 of Nautilus was released. This 1.0 version was included in GNOME 1.4, released on 13 March, 2001.

I was able to track down a virtual machine image of Red Hat running GNOME 1.4 and after a little but of massaging was able to run it in QEMU on my much newer Linux system. Incidently GNOME Files—Nautilus’ successor—is my file manager of choice on Linux. Please enjoy these screenshots I took of that surprisingly usable 23 year old system.

Screenshot of the GNOME 1.4 desktop. There is a Nautilus window open on the 'Start Here' page.
Start Here
Screenshot of the About Nautilus dialog listing many names in the credits, including Andy Hertzfeld. The Eazel logo is in the top right of the window.
About Nautilus
A screenshot of early 2000s GIMP.
GNU Image Manipulation Program
An early version of the GNOME website in the Mozilla browser.
Early version of the GNOME website in the Mozilla browser
The now defunct Linux Orbit website in the Mozilla browser
Linux Orbit website in the Mozilla browser
Screenshot of the Nautilus help showing a delightfully annotated screenshot of a Nautilus window.
Nautilus Help

If you’d like to try it out yourself, follow the steps below to run it with QEMU. Alternatively, if you use Virtual Box you can import the .ova directly:

  1. Download the image from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/misc/GNOME1.4.ova
  2. Extract the disk image: tar xf GNOME1.4.ova
  3. Convert it to qcow2: qemu-img convert GNOME\ 1.4-disk1.vmdk GNOME\ 1.4-disk1.qcow2
  4. Run it: qemu-system-i386 -m 256M -nic user,model=pcnet -drive file='GNOME 1.4-disk1.qcow2'

The login details are: username gnome, password gnomehistory. The root user also has the same password.