Although many of us won’t admit it, we all enjoy a bit of nostalgia. Here’s some from 20 to 25 years ago. Kids today™, they don’t know how good they have it. There’s a tendency to romance the “powerful” workstations from the turn of the century. I do the same thing with the Lisp Machines but I was there for those turn-of-the-century workstations and I can tell you from first hand experience that someone sitting in front of a run-of-the-mill laptop running Linux, FreeBSD , or even macOS is having a much better Unix/Emacs experience than the folks sitting in front of one of those old workstations had.
Nevertheless, nostalgia is strong and many would like to experience what it was like. Victor Larios is offering a trip on the tech time machine to experience what it was like back then. The “time machine” consists is a browser based recreation of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) complete with the then popular XEmacs.
XEmacs was popular then mainly because Gnu Emacs was dragging its feet on adapting to the X Window system and it offered a better experience. I was a Vim user in those days so I can’t speak to its relative merits but all my Emacs-using colleagues were running it. GNU Emacs eventually caught up and surpassed the XEmacs implementation so XEmacs has pretty much faded into oblivion but it was state of the art back then.
In any event, if you sometimes have nostalgia pangs about the “old days” and would like to see was it was like, here’s an easy way to scratch the itch.