Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau
From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: NeWS available for HP workstations ?
Message-ID: <12404@jade.BBN.COM>
Date: 19 Dec 88 22:21:51 GMT
References: <8812191027.AA19821@ecn.uucp>
Reply-To: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 50

In comp.windows.news (<8812191027.AA19821@ecn.uucp>), wim@ecn.UUCP 
(Wim Rijnsburger) writes:
>At the moment we use SUN workstations, but we want to use [NeWS]
>on HP workstations in the future. Does anyone know if NeWS is available
>on HP and how we can get it?

I've not heard of anyone porting NeWS to HP's, but this does bring up 
the larger question of "How can the interested NeWS-using community
get NeWS on non-Sun hardware?"

Basically, there seem to be 3 possibilities:

  (1)  Sun ports and sells NeWS for other machines.  This doesn't
       seem very likely, for lots of reasons.

  (2)  Independent companies port NeWS to other hardware.  There are
       a couple of examples of this already, including NeWS for the
       Parallax display hardware, NeWS for the Mac II, and NeWS for
       OS/2, but it's not clear that such companies will ever be 
       able to supplant vendor-supplied window systems on other 
       machines.

  (3)  Other vendors license and provide NeWS technology, probably 
       via their own supported, optimized ports of the merged server
       (whenever it becomes available).

The third of these is clearly the most desirable from the user community's
point of view -- only when vendors start shipping and supporting NeWS
technology will it ever have a chance of becoming universal.  

Unfortunately, the politics of the workstation, OS, and window system 
worlds seems to make it unlikely that competing vendors will license and
distribute NeWS or the merge on their own.  Economic incentives, however, 
might help to convince them :-)

What this suggests to me is that if you're in the position of buying and
using workstations, and you also want (or need) to use NeWS, *make sure
your vendor knows it*.  

There was a certain initial resistance on the part of some vendors to 
adopting NFS, but when customers started to demand it [you know, like 
telling your local salesman "We're not interested in purchasing any more 
of your machines until they support NFS"], things started to happen.  
Now you can take almost any collection of bizarre machines, from PC's 
to IBM mainframes, plug them all in on the same network, and have them 
share files relatively well.

Unfortunately, I tend to think it's going to take similar pressure to
make NeWS window system technology as widespread as NFS is now.  So the
general answer to "How can we get NeWS on hardware X?" is DEMAND IT!