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From: keith@xenon.lcs.mit.edu (Keith Packard)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Eyes (was Just some sortof anecdotes)
Message-ID: <1990Jun9.030305.20884@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 9 Jun 90 03:03:05 GMT
References: <1990Jun5.072454.25634@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> <3772@trantor.harris-atd.com> <8743@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Sender: news@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu
Reply-To: keith@xenon.lcs.mit.edu.UUCP (Keith Packard)
Organization: MIT X Consortium
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In article <8743@odin.corp.sgi.com> msc@sgi.com writes:
>Lara here at SGI drew the following article to my attention.
>
>In article <3772@trantor.harris-atd.com>, chuck@melmac.harris-atd.com
>(Chuck Musciano) writes:
>|>      Regarding items 3 and 4: "those darn neat eyes" first appeared running
>|> under SunView, and were later ported to X.  I should know; I wrote the
>|> original "eyecon" program in August of 1988 and released it to the net.
>|> Subsequent versions appeared for X and NeWS later.  The xeyes demo released
>|> with X is dated July, 1989, a year after my version.  However, is there even
>|> a mention of my name in the code?  At least I was proper enough to credit
>|> Mark Callow, of Silicon Graphics, in my version.  I first saw a version of
>|> the eyes program running on an SGI machine under NeWS at SIGGRAPH '88 in
>|> Atlanta.  Mark produced that version, to the best of my knowledge.  I was so
>|> taken by it I wrote a version for suntools as soon as I got home.
>|> 
>|>      I was a little disappointed to see the X version appear without
>|> proper credit, both to myself and Mark.
>|> 
>
>While I would love to take credit for creating the eyes, I can't.  The NeWS
>eyes (which were the first) were created by Jeremy Huxtable from England.
>Here is the program header.

As the author of xeyes, I'd certainly like to apologize to all of the
original authors whose estimable work was followed by my own meager
implementation.

I saw the eyes at the '88 SIGGRAPH in Atlanta during the talk cited above
and raced home to write the X version.  As no citation was given during the
talk (although it was arguably one of the most entertainly portions), I had
no idea who to credit.  Even though the Sunview version may have appeared in
public before the R3 version, xeyes had been running within MIT since a
few days after SIGGRAPH '88.  Actually, the original copyright on xeyes is
from 1988.

The xeyes sources included with R3 had an attribution which attempted to
identify as closely as possible the original source:

"This directory is new to R3.  It is a fun little toy that was stolen from
 a demo at SIGGRAPH '88."

Now that we know the true author, I'll certainly add a reference in the
manual.

Always important to document the history of these leaps in user interface
technology to preserve them for posterity.

Keith Packard
MIT X Consortium