Crossbar and NeWS questions

I have two questions that have interested me a little, and as Johnson would put it I know neither the answer nor where to go to find the answer. (1) What is the history of the crossbar in computer architectures as a mainbus replacement? All I know of it is when it hit the desktop, and there it looks like it arrived first in the DEC 3000 AXP (not sure if this includes the 300 series or not), and then spread around the middle of the '90s with Sun picking it up as UPA and SGI going whole-hog for it. I assume it came down from mainframes or supercomputers, possibly a Control Data design? (2) What was the UI like on Sun's pre-OpenLook implementation of NeWS (or was there one?) Did it leverage SunView, or were parts of it similar to SGIs 4Sight?