Tuesday, August 31, 2004
NeWS
James Gosling talks about his first project at Sun, a PostScript-based window system called NeWS (the Networked, extensible, Window System).
Back in the day, I used NeWS on SGI boxes and then X11/NeWS on Sun boxes. NeWS was a really cool set of ideas but the implementations I used were slow and clunky. It was too easy to take down the display server with misbehaving code. And it really wasn't much fun writing UI code in a odd mixture of C and Postscript.
Later at Lotus, we used Display Postscript on NeXT for Improv. Huge difference. The implementation was fast and solid. Plus, you only needed to use Postscript directly when you wanted to do something exotic. Most of the time you just used the AppKit.
That's not to say that NeWS was fundamentally flawed. It was certainly nicer than SunView. As James says, NeWS died for a variety of reasons. In my opinion, the medocre quality of the early implementations was only one of them. Probably the biggest reason was that X11 came along, had lots of vendor support and was "open source". X11 was far from elegant but it worked and was good enough.
Note: James has some interesting notes about what he'd do if he was writing a Window System from scratch. (Via Barry Briggs)
Back in the day, I used NeWS on SGI boxes and then X11/NeWS on Sun boxes. NeWS was a really cool set of ideas but the implementations I used were slow and clunky. It was too easy to take down the display server with misbehaving code. And it really wasn't much fun writing UI code in a odd mixture of C and Postscript.
Later at Lotus, we used Display Postscript on NeXT for Improv. Huge difference. The implementation was fast and solid. Plus, you only needed to use Postscript directly when you wanted to do something exotic. Most of the time you just used the AppKit.
That's not to say that NeWS was fundamentally flawed. It was certainly nicer than SunView. As James says, NeWS died for a variety of reasons. In my opinion, the medocre quality of the early implementations was only one of them. Probably the biggest reason was that X11 came along, had lots of vendor support and was "open source". X11 was far from elegant but it worked and was good enough.
Note: James has some interesting notes about what he'd do if he was writing a Window System from scratch. (Via Barry Briggs)
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