Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!wave
From: wave@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael B. Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: why X? what am I missing?
Message-ID: <4860@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 13 Jan 91 21:47:12 GMT
References: <12048.278dfd95@ecs.umass.edu>
Reply-To: wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Michael B. Johnson)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 33

In article <12048.278dfd95@ecs.umass.edu> gerst@ecs.umass.edu writes:
>>
>>What is the REAL reason people are choosing X based systems over the NeXT?
>>
>>Is there something I'm missing? What is running on X that everyone is using
>>other than Xterm, Xeyes and Backgammon :) ???
>>
>>Chris Lloyd - lloyd@ucs.umass.edu

I was going to send mail, but I thought maybe others might be interested:

I work at Thinking Machines in the summer.  They make a real big and fast
machine, the Connection Machine 2.  One of the real challenges of a
machine like that is how to get people to effectively integrate it
into a heterogenous, multi-vendor network.  We wrote some software
last year called Generic Display to allow users to easily display
datasets that were on the CM-2.  Generic Display supports 3 sorts of
displays: Symbolics Lispm Color Framebuffers, the CM-2's high
bandwidth frame buffer, and X.  Now, it's X that's the important one.
We can now display pictures of what's going on inside the machine on
virtually any other machine on the internet.  Any machine running X, that
is.  To help someone debug some code last year, we had him run it on a
CM-2 here in Cambridge and display his images on his workstation in
Sweden.  It worked!  I could go on, but hopefully you see my point...

It's not a NeXTStep vs. X thing.  It's an interoperability thing.
NeXT needs to do X, the same way it needs to do TCP/IP and NFS.

-- 

-->  Michael B. Johnson
-->  MIT Media Lab      --  Computer Graphics & Animation Group
-->  (617) 253-0663     --  wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu