Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!emory!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!sci.ccny.cuny.edu!phri!news From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: bionet.software Subject: Re: X-Windows, InterViews, and molecular biology software Message-ID: <1991Feb13.182415.22449@phri.nyu.edu> Date: 13 Feb 91 18:24:15 GMT Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System) Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City Lines: 40 gilbertd@cricket.bio.indiana.edu writes: > I've been learning How Unix Works over the past month You must be a fast learner. It's taken me 10 years, and I'm still not sure I know what's going on all the time! > X-Windows is the Unix (and VMS) sibling of a Macintosh or MS-Windows > graphic user interface. There is nothing about X (in theory) that ties it to Unix (or VMS, or any other operating system). The big win, in my mind, will be that you can run an X server on your Mac and use an application on a Cray somewhere else in the world. There is another windowing system called NeWS which was being pushed by Sun a couple of years back as a competitor to X. There are lots of reasons why I thought (and still think) that NeWS is superior to X, but the basic fact is that X seems to have won out; even Sun has hopped on the X bandwagon, although they are walking a fine line trying to keep their NeWS customers happy too. I'm of mixed mind about whether X (or NeWS) will be a big thing in the laboratory environment. It takes quite a bit of horsepower to run an X server (or, for that matter, a NeWS server; my 8 Mbyte Sun-3/50 is pretty marginal for either). You really need something like a 12 Mbyte SPARCStation before you will be happy, from what I understand. I just don't see that much horsepower being common on benchtops and biologists' office desks anytime soon. What I do see is lots of Mac Plus/SE/Classics and the occasional Mac-IIcx/si/ci and lots of 286-based DOS machines, and the occasional 386. I don't see too many of them on high speed networks (i.e. ethernet; I don't think you would be very happy running X over LocalTalk) and I don't see that changing much in the next couple of years. Biologist who are really into computers already have the big machines needed to run X (Mac-IIfx, SPARCStation, Iris, DECStation, etc) and will continue to upgrade those machines, but I don't see them getting into the vast majority of the labs and offices. -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "Arcane? Did you say arcane? It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"