Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!lacsap From: lacsap@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Pascal Chesnais) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: X11 for the NeXTstation Summary: NeXT did support MIT's effort to port X Message-ID: <4850@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> Date: 12 Jan 91 15:34:09 GMT References: <1991Jan10.020437.14465@cs.mcgill.ca> <17136@csli.Stanford.EDU> Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA Lines: 70 In article , melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: > In article <1117@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes: > > > People can't throw away a $100,000 investment. The NeXT has to be > able to coexist in existing environments like DOS, and X. > Hmmm maybe I should have them cart away the IBM 6000 here since it does not run Mac applications... we have $ks invested in Macs:-) Look why doesn't everyone find something real to flame about, or better yet port X to the NeXT... The sources are all there, and there is nothing in the NeXT environment that would stop someone from doing it. > NeXT has better things to worry about... like developing a > C2-certifiable release. Or innovating how workstations will deal with sound and movies in one platform. X does not rationalize digital movies with sound yet. When NeXT comes out with their color product it it will be cool to see how they dealt with synchronization issues, and use that knowledge to improve other window systems like X. > Not porting X themselves is one thing, but they could have supported > the others that were doing it. How far did the people get that were > supporting XNeXT? R4 does run under NeXTStep 1.0. How much work > would it take to get it to work under 2.0 if NeXT helped the > programmer? NeXT is throwing away easy money! Even Macintoy has X > support. Here I have to go on record, the MIT effort had FULL cooperation from NeXT including sending the group to California to work with the NeXT software engineers... The problem was that MIT sent students who are free agents and went on to other things (including one working for NeXT). The same is true with the McGill effort, Mike is a student hacker, not guaranteed to be around n-months down the line. As posted in an earlier message, Pencomm is getting the full cooperation from NeXT... I suppose this has to do with the assumption (maybe a false one) that the guys working on the Pencomm effort will not graduate in 3 months. The other problem is that neither the MIT group or the McGill effort had the benefit of doing the NeXT Developer course prior to their ports... Having gone through it I can see how things would have been done differently in both ports, and both would have worked in 2.0... ALL major manufacturers started off with their own window system, and then eventually supported X. I have seen this evolution over a few years, NeXT is a young company, and is seeing what they can offer that is DIFFERENT from everyone else. A noble effort that resulted us in taking sound in the workstation for granted. People are kludging in sound into X... Just as they did with Color a few years ago... > As it is, we see NeXTs having a lot fewer deficiencies than Suns. > As soon as the color NeXTs start shipping in volume, we'll have > a hard time justifying more SPARCstations--they're just too damn > expensive to bring up to a similar level of functionality. > As soon as.... NeXT has had machines on the market for more than 2 > years. As soon as NeXT has a low cost machine.... How many people > can justify spending $2000 on a color monitor alone? We can... but technically there is nothing stopping you from buying the monitor from another source... You will find out that good quality monitors are expensive no matter who you buy them from... Sure you can connect a shitty low cost monitor on your machine, but you get what pay for... NeXT does not manufactur monitors, so you will not see a big price break... Enough flaming, who has a neat hack to share??? pasc -- Pascal Chesnais, Research Specialist, Electronic Publishing Group Media Laboratory, E15-348, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Ma, 02139 (617) 253-0311 email: lacsap@plethora.media.mit.edu (NeXT)