NeWS

It was thus said that the Great healyzh(a)aracnet.com once stated: NeWS (NEtwork Window System or Network Extensible Windowing System, not really sure which one) was written by James Gosling at Sun (and he's still there, working on Java last I heard), probably around the time MIT was working on the initial versions of X Windows. Like X it is server/client (only in these cases, the server is in front of the user and the client could be down the hall. Most people think this is backwards but technically it isn't) but because of Postscript, a client could send code to the server and have it execute there instead of transmitting packets back and forth (for example, Xeyes is a rather network heavy program (a pair of eyes track the mouse cursor). Under NeWS, the ``eyes'' program could be set to the server and executed there, and thus no network traffic at all be sent). Because of that, it could be used in low bandwidth situations. Pitty it never took off, but I think licensing issues (from both Sun and Adobe) pretty much killed it off. -spc (And it was surprisingly fast. At least on SGI hardware, which is where I only ever saw it ... )