Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: NeXT not revolutionary enough?
Message-ID: <1988Nov3.192722.647@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu> <354@auspex.UUCP> <7092@potomac.ads.com>
Date: Thu, 3 Nov 88 19:27:22 GMT

In article <7092@potomac.ads.com> jtn@potomac.ads.com (John T. Nelson) writes:
>What NeXT and the world needs is a true windowing shell to replace the
>tty-style shells.

"Replace"?  How do you propose to replace the shell's programmability with
a windowing shell?  That's been the big stumbling block in the past.  As
far as I know it's an unsolved problem.  It's easy enough to build something
that will suffice for most interactive use; making it useful for shell
programming is orders of magnitude harder.

>Also, if mice and bitmapped screens had been around in those days,
>then Unix might have seen lightweight processes a lot earlier to
>support those more intelligence and complex interfaces.

By previous standards, Unix processes *are* lightweight!
-- 
The Earth is our mother.        |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Our nine months are up.         |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu