Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!cornell!jhr From: jhr@maui.cs.cornell.edu (John Reppy) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: X11 for the NeXTstation Message-ID: <50361@cornell.UUCP> Date: 6 Jan 91 20:49:40 GMT References: <1991Jan3.135628.78@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu> <49737@sequent.UUCP> Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP Reply-To: jhr@cs.cornell.edu (John Reppy) Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY Lines: 37 In article simmons@nucst4.neep.wisc.edu (kim h simmons) writes: ... > > I think that the long term survival of NeXT probably depends on them having >some kind of support for X11. NeXT is the only major workstation manufacturer >that does not provide support for X11. As Sun and Dec and everyone else >found out (much to their dismay) users (and in particular the people who >buy hundreds of workstations at a time) want standards. Sun's primary >windowing system is now X based. They didn't do this because they wanted to, >they did it (for better or worse) in order to survive. One of these >standards is X11. It is an FIP (Federal Information Processing) standard as >well. Support for X11 is very important in being able to compete with Dec and >Sun (something i think that NeXT can do) for these big contracts. > On the other hand, maybe NeXT is not interested in this market. I really >don't care about X11 on my NeXT at home, but at work, NeXT has already >lost some orders to Sun and Dec because they do not come with X11. On the >other hand, i could be wrong. What do you think? > I agree; X-windows has its problems, but at least it allows people to do reasonable things in a heterogeneous distributed environment (such as most universities have). If NeXT is just going to be a fancy PC, then this isn't a problem; but if NeXT wants to compete with Sun and DEC, then they need to provide a way to use their equipment in conjunction with other workstations and servers. There may be a reasonable solution to this problem that avoids putting NeXT into the position of sacrificing their vision. Run NextStep as a window manager on top of a X-server that supports the DPS extensions (a la DECWindows). Then NextStep would just be another look-feel standard with toolkit (like Motif and OpenLook). It would then be possible to run standard X11 applications on the NeXT display (and be able to do thing like cut and paste between X applications and NextStep applications). Of course this would involve a lot of reimplementation, but, if the NextStep class libraries are well designed, it shouldn't have a big impact on user code. - John (jhr@cs.cornell.edu)