Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!bellcore!texbell!bigtex!milano!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!arisia!lll-winken!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!ames!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!auspex!guy From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT not revolutionary enough? Message-ID: <8769@spl1.UUCP> Date: 1 Nov 88 18:52:17 GMT References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu> <354@auspex.UUCP> <7092@potomac.ads.com> Sender: news@spl1.UUCP Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 76 >> Does he mean what small set of routines you might think of as "user >> interface" routines are in the OS intrinsics set? Well, the NeXT >> machine comes with a window system toolkit, just like the Mac, so >> you're not stuck with "printf". > >Umm.... is that windowing toolkit part of Mach or does it just exist >in that fancy interface? Who cares? If I can write programs that use it, I don't give a damn what the name of the library is. It's probably not part of the Mach *kernel* (i.e., the part running in privileged mode, and probably wired down), which is a Good Thing. >To get back to the previous poster's comment about Unix being >text-oriented... weren't the tty driver, sh and csh all written with >ttys in mind? "Okay, you say ... we just remove the sh and csh and >tty driver and replace them with a new kind of interface that handles >mice and bitmapped screens, but keep the kernel relatively intact." > >Sounds good. Is this what NeXT is doing or are they going the route >of Sun Microsystems, where every window interface they've built so far >was built to run on top of the shell? Kindof a kludge if you ask me. I'm not sure what you mean by "to run on top of the shell". If you mean "you can run them from the shell, yeah, but so what? "shelltool" and "cmdtool" are NOT the only window system tools that come on Suns. The Network Software Environment (or whatever it's called) has a graphic interface; it also has a command-line interface for people who don't like graphic interfaces. There are also other applications available for Suns - and other workstations - with graphic interfaces. >What NeXT and the world needs is a true windowing shell to replace the >tty-style shells. Yes, that might be nice, although "replace" is wrong; try "supplement". I don't know that anybody's constructed a graphical shell that *all* users of the more traditional user interfaces would consider an adequate replacement. (As I understand it, various Xerox workstations have had command-line interfaces, at least in the development environments used inside Xerox.) >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. So? Does the Mac have lightweight processes? Yes, they're nice to have (BTW, Mach has them), but I don't know that they're a *prerequisite*. >> The main potential difference I see is that the Mac has zillions more >> applications than the NeXT box *currently* has. However, I don't see >> that UNIX makes it impossible to write the same kind of applications, > >Hey... remember the first Macintosh? The big problem was that there >were virtually NO applications for the machine. No one wanted to >write any for a machine that was aimed "for the rest of us" with Big >Blue already well entrenched. Umm, Big Blue's machine didn't have boatloads of applications when it first came out, either. I don't see the point you're trying to make here. >There are few windowing applications for Unix perhaps because the Unix >kernel doesn't support a standard interface. The fact that "the UNIX kernel" - by which you presumably mean "the lump of code stored in files with names like "/unix", "/vmunix", etc. - doesn't have a standard window system interface is a Good Thing. That stuff tends to be wired down, and is harder to replace and harder to debug than user-mode code. >Vendors would have to either package their own windowing systems with >the applications or sell their own windowing systems and hope someone >adopts them. You mean like e.g. X11? I think it stands a chance of becoming a standard part of most UNIX offerings.