I implemented tabbed windows for NeWS, UniPress (Gosling) Emacs, and the HyperTies hypermedia authoring tool in 1988, and shipped them in a commercial product (UniPress Emacs 2.20).
They were written in object oriented PostScript, as an extension of the NeWS window manager, so you could apply them to the windows of all NeWS applications, and they were especially useful for UniPress Emacs (which was the first version of Emacs to support opening multiple windows, so you ended up opening a LOT of them at once, which the tabs really helped with).
The Wikipedia page describes my earliest implementation of tabbed windows for NeWS in 1988, and has a screen snapshot of tabbed windows and pie menus with UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES on NeWS:
And later at Sun I re-implemented tabbed windows and pie menus for TNT (The NeWS Toolkit), and we implemented an ICCCM X11 window manager for X11/NeWS that could consistently apply tabbed windows with pie menus to all X11 and NeWS windows.
Here's a demo of tabbed windows for The NeWS Toolkit (which we could wrap around X-Windows too):
This posting describes different versions of tabbed windows, including PSIBER with tabbed windows for PostScript objects that you can impale on a "spike" that represents the PostScript stack, the tabbed pie menu X11/NeWS window manager:
These discusses the advantages of putting tabs on the side (and enabling users to move them around the any side: top, bottom, left or right), instead of just the top:
Very impressive. I wish this had become a common feature of GUIs beyond the browser.
One thing I liked a lot about the Windows95 GUI when it was introduced were the tabbed property and settings. They kind of went by the wayside as a general concept though they survive in places (not that I’ve had much experience with Windows over the course of the past 20 years or so).
On the topic of moving tabs, I was a BeOS user and one thing that I enjoyed enormously (albeit in an infantile and purposelessly inchoate manner) was sliding the yellow title tab around by holding (if I remember correctly) the shift key. It wasn’t ever developed into something useful but it was fun and suggested it would be made into a useful feature.
They were written in object oriented PostScript, as an extension of the NeWS window manager, so you could apply them to the windows of all NeWS applications, and they were especially useful for UniPress Emacs (which was the first version of Emacs to support opening multiple windows, so you ended up opening a LOT of them at once, which the tabs really helped with).
The Wikipedia page describes my earliest implementation of tabbed windows for NeWS in 1988, and has a screen snapshot of tabbed windows and pie menus with UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES on NeWS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History
And later at Sun I re-implemented tabbed windows and pie menus for TNT (The NeWS Toolkit), and we implemented an ICCCM X11 window manager for X11/NeWS that could consistently apply tabbed windows with pie menus to all X11 and NeWS windows.
Here's a demo of tabbed windows for The NeWS Toolkit (which we could wrap around X-Windows too):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4
This posting describes different versions of tabbed windows, including PSIBER with tabbed windows for PostScript objects that you can impale on a "spike" that represents the PostScript stack, the tabbed pie menu X11/NeWS window manager:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730
These discusses the advantages of putting tabs on the side (and enabling users to move them around the any side: top, bottom, left or right), instead of just the top:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181988