Xref: utzoo comp.windows.news:1778 comp.windows.x:16269 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mstar!mstar.morningstar.com!bob From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x Subject: Re: Is SUN a "PURE PLAYER" in window systems - SunView or OpenWindows??? Message-ID: Date: 2 Jan 90 15:06:39 GMT References: <8912302010.AA11723@super.super.org> <13323@diamond.BBN.COM> Sender: news@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Organization: Morning Star Technologies Lines: 58 In-reply-to: mlandau@bbn.com's message of 31 Dec 89 02:05:47 GMT (Bob starts the new year by diving into a flamefest :-) In article <13323@diamond.BBN.COM> mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) writes: The place where Sun botched it was in not doing a "sample implementation" of NeWS and making it publicly available in the same way that the "sample implementation" of X11 is freely available. Right! And it's surprising that their marketeers didn't see that. Enough people at the time were offering such suggestions as free advice, one wonders why Sun didn't listen. It's too late now. If they had, X would have died off by now, because NeWS is simply a technically superior idea. X may not have died off yet. It has become a rallying point for other companies' marketeers who noticed that Sun was getting its name on too many innovations that were being adopted as de-facto standards. The widespread adoption of X was, IMHO, largely in response to the announcement of NeWS. And since that time we've seen corresponding marketing department-based battles over the underlying operating systems (Why do you think OSF exists? Entirely for marketing and political reasons, the technical concerns included as an afterthought. But I digress still more...). For the life of me, I still can't understand how anyone involved in the early design phases of X11... My understanding is that X grew from W, the window system atop the V kernel from Stanford. ...Was no one familiar with the history of SunDEW, for example? V happened before SunDEW, and X just carried much of W's basic technology along. An interesting semi-early (1985) reference is "Methodology of Window Management", Aho, Hopgood, and Ullman; Springer-Verlag. Sorry, my copy is at home, else I'd have the ISBN handy to cite. The conference of which the book contains the proceedings discusses various historic approaches to windows and user interfaces on various underlying software architectures (Cedar, UNIX, Perqs, etc.) Well worth reading. No, Display PostScript doesn't count. Right! It's another marketing-originated red herring. It's useful for those without a sufficient imaging model who realized later (as PostScript printers became universal) that they needed to invoke the magic P-word for "compatibility". The so-called "extensibility" of the X11 protocol also doesn't count. It might help to have a sample implementation of a server that would be protocol-extensible on the fly, at runtime. In the mean time, X runs on everything and there are lots and lots of people writing free software for it. I use X mainly for those reasons, though my aesthetic sensibilities cry out for better.