NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System, lecture by James Gosling
Why Hacker News recommends it
Shared in threads on window systems and X11 history as a primary-source talk on why NeWS was technically ahead of X.
What it is
A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends kristopolous · 2021-11 · on “The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021”
Open look was originally from Sun NeWS, an alternative to X built with AT&T. Example: [LINK] It was an interface that could degrade extremely well to monochrome and still look reasonable on the lousy LCDs of the 1980s. The hit points are large and spaced out enough so that it could be operated via the janky touch screens of the era as well Also NeWS used postscript as the display language. It extended it to allow the interactive elements. SGI also had a system based on NeWS called 4Sight: [LINK] Here's James Gosling (you know, guy that invented Java) talking about it for an hour or so from 1990 [this video]
Recommends panick21_ · 2024-03 · on “The Berkeley Software Distribution”
This was the moment many former Sun people identify as the 'death of original Sun'. Sun wanted to make SMP work, so Solaris was a huge amount of work and was incredibly buggy for a long time. Sun effectively lost a huge amount of time going threw this transition and it took years to be back to the same amount of stability. Bryan Cantril talkes about this in LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos [1] But not everybody agree, if you read 'Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems' that was written in 1991, they are very pro the AT&T deal and explicitly call out the BSD people as 'anti-Standard' and thus anti-Sun. The real difference there is the argument about what a Standard i
Cites pjmlp · 2020-09 · on “Nova by Panic”
It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience, You can start by having a look at, [LINK] "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [LINK] "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [LINK] "SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985" [LINK] You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece, [LINK] Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS, "NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System," [this video] Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas. Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to ma