Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!sun!kimba!hvr From: hvr%kimba@Sun.COM (Heather Rose) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Has X Won the Window Wars? (was Re: Is NeWS UseABLE?) Message-ID: <66437@sun.uucp> Date: 31 Aug 88 20:16:12 GMT References: <229.8808111329@jura.ritd.co.uk> <1082@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> Sender: news@sun.uucp Reply-To: hvr@sun.UUCP (Heather Rose) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 57 In article <1082@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> jefu@pawl13.pawl.rpi.edu (Jeffrey Putnam) writes: >Me too. But I would like to add that I think that the window has >essentially closed. Alot of people said that UNIX would never catch on for alot of the same reasons that people are saying NeWS will not catch on: to unreliable, too hard to learn, too big. But, as the market has demanded more performance, UNIX has caught on more and more. I think the same thing could happen with NeWS. X11 has many very serious limitations that NeWS addresses. And as people need more functionality and do not find it in X[foo], then they will chose a new windowing system which could be NeWS or whatever else is the wizziest thing on the market. Besides, X is not the only other windowing system on the market today: SunView, Mac Windows, MS Windows, .... I think this group of people (USENET) is skewed towards X because of the type of people who read these groups. One thing X will have a big problem with is input from new devices (according to Jim Gettys at the Bay Area X User's Group meeting). NeWS has a very simple and clean input design which could be easily extended to receive input from any type of device. Another problem I see with X is lack of standards: no standard toolkit and no standard look and feel. Whenever we have a new rev of X, we also have to have a whole new slew of toolkits...mostly a complete re-write. NeWS will have more stability in the next release with NDE and Open Look. And even with future releases of NeWS...it will not change much because it has been relatively well-designed in the first place. Jim Gettys said that X was just a hacked together project that DEC latched on to. So even if a company were to write it's own toolkit in NeWS...that code would remain much more constant across releases than an X toolkit. One more point about NeWS: I think the biggest complaint aside from "too buggy" is that it is too difficult to understand for most programmers. I think that is the reason why we do not see 101 public domain NeWS toolkits on the market. Learning object-oriented programming and PostScript (a stack-based language) is a challenge. But this issue should be addressed by the new toolkit, NDE. We'll see what happens with windowing in the next year or so. Really, as far as the masses are concerned...they are still using glass tty's or little tiny Mac screens with Mac Windows. Most colleges still do not have bit-mapped displays for their undergrads (something other than Mac)...that is a vast market that is as yet untapped. I think it's premature to say that the window-wars are over and X has won. Geez... most colleges don't even offer a course on windowing systems... Most engineers still graduate only knowing FORTRAN as a programming language. Most people don't even read USENET or even know what it is... Personally, I think the window-wars will begin once machines like the Mac II become cheap enough for the masses to buy. And easy enough for the masses to use... Heather Rose disclaimer: of course these opinions are my own...nobody else would want them!