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From: jerry@heyman.austin.ibm.com (Jerry Heyman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Windows for Amiga?? Maybe!!
Summary: XWindows on an Amiga
Message-ID: <4320@awdprime.UUCP>
Date: 24 Nov 90 22:56:36 GMT
References: <90324.194527JKT100@psuvm.psu.edu> <2220001@hppad.HP.COM>
Sender: news@awdprime.UUCP
Organization: IBM AWD, Austin
Lines: 37

In article <2220001@hppad.HP.COM> dolson@hppad.HP.COM (David Dolson) writes:
>
>You want a standard window system?
>
>Consider XWindows... A really powerfull standard.  You can get generic
>C source code for the X server from MIT fairly cheap.  You fill in the
>low-level graphics an OS routines yourself.
>
>But... It's huge.  It probably takes most of a MEG to run if you include
>all of the features.  It might run fairly slow depending on how well you
>can wedge in the Amiga hardware.
>

With the succes of Motif (based on XWindows and Presentation Manager with some 
others thrown in for good measure) the future of GUI's might have already been
somewhat decided.  There are a lot of applications that are being written with
Motif interfaces.  While I know of no one that has ported the Motif widget set
to the Amiga, XWindows already has been running on top of AmigaDOS for at least
a year thanks to Dale Luck - so running XWindows DOES NOT imply that one must
run Unix(tm) also.

What we wind up with is two interfaces on the Amiga, Intuition and XWindows. I
fail to see why we need to add yet another interface to support?  MS Windows
is a veneer on top of the OS (in this case MS-DOS) that handles things that the
OS can't - things that AmigaDOS already DOES handle.  Do you honestly think
that JUST because the Amiga supported MS Windows there would be a whole slew
of new applications for the Amiga?  MS Windows has been great for sales, but
there still aren't too many applications writtent to take advantage of it...

Just my $0.02 worth,

jerry
-- 
Jerry Heyman                     IBM T-R: jerry@heyman.austin.ibm.com
AWD Tools Development            VNET   : HEYMAN at AUSVMQ
AWD Austin                       T/L    : 793-3962
*** All opinions expressed are exactly that - my opinions and NOT IBM's