9 Aug
2012
9 Aug
'12
10:21 a.m.
In article <8CF44574DE1ABEA-11DC-6DEF8 at webmail-m094.sysops.aol.com>,
Scott Quinn <saquinn624 at aol.com> writes:
[...] (on the side - what software used the NeWS
portion of that? Anyone here used the straight Sun NeWS? NeWS seems to be
difficult to find information on besides the Don Hopkins site)
I obtained a large pile of Sun NeWS stuff from Shawn Rutledge via
cctalk. I haven't yet gotten around to scanning the documentation and
archiving the media. However, I'm not aware of any significant or
commercial application for Sun or SGI workstations using the actual
NeWS portion of it.
There was very little to no development support for it. I
experimented with making a simple UI in NeWS on the SGI Personal IRIS
while a graduate student at the University of Utah in 1988. I'm the
only person I know at UU who ever attempted such a thing and I think
I've only heard of one or two other programmers who ever attempted
such a thing. It was very, very painful. Making a UI in X11 was far
easier, even if you did it "by hand" using Xlib and not Xt.
[...] In common with the later
DOMAIN DM implementations it, too, came with an X server that could be run
on top.
I have been attempting to find details on the Apollo DOMAIN/OS
windowing environment before they started running X11, but so far
haven't been able to find much of anything.
Even the X11 Display PostScript extension wasn't used much by applications
except for some niche markets like desktop publishing. The benefits
are too few for most applications. NeXTStep includes Display
Postscript under the covers, but I don't think actual applications
really used it -- they used the objects in the UI framework instead.
Those objects could just have easily implemented their rendering with
X11 and probably noone except the most ardent of typographical
rendering freaks would have noticed the difference.
NeWS is one of those things that is in my
"interested to find more
out about, but probably not interested in programming" because of the
additional PostScript layer on top. Did they have any IDEs to help with
that?
No IDE support. If you want to get a feel for what it's like to
program in NeWS, just start playing around with PostScript. NeWS is a
very thin veneer on top of PS.
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