Computer History Museum
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2024
49:39 · 4.5K views · Aug 30, 2016
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.
Shared in threads on window systems and X11 history as a primary-source talk on why NeWS was technically ahead of X.
3 comments from Hacker News
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 is. Their approach is basically Unix belongs to AT&T and therefore they are the standard. While the (in my opinion) more correct argument was that BSD/Sun had the most software and they were the defacto standard and being more open, continuing be the standard was what Sun should have done. Another incredibly important battle was over X vs NeWS. NeWS was arguably technically superior. There is a nice talk by James Gosling about it [2]. It still had technical problems but it would have been a great base to build off. But because some companies, lead by Dec made X open(ish) and many embraced it, X became 'the standard' and thus many at Sun basically said 'Well X is the standard, so therefore we have to switch to X'. Instead of saying, lets make NeWS open and try to be the Standard. The Sun tra
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
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 make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack. So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top. On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS. The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions.