On 8/9/12 10:21 AM, Richard wrote: There wasn't anything in the Apollo documents on bitsavers? In the queue are about 100 ESDI Apollo disks with what HP had left of Apollo's development environment. I'm hoping they're still readable.

On 8/9/2012 10:21 AM, Richard wrote: I think Sun had some sort of idea that they could standardize the middle layer of info for displays and printing. I do recall a term called Display Postscript, which I think is in the mix somewhere. The printers they all had at sun were all running NeWS, and that is all I ever saw it used for. There was also Openwindows which was replaced by OLWM. I think Openwindows is about all you can run on the older sparc1's and IPC IPX machines because of memory requirements. Jim

In article <502409A1.7010307 at jwsss.com>, jim s <jws at jwsss.com> writes: PostScript works really well as a universal page description language because each program that want to target a PS printer basically emits a "preamble" that fills the PS runtime environment with primitives tailored to the application and then "printing" becomes a traversal of your in-memory display list, emitting custom PS primitives for each item in your internal data structure. PS acts as a universal back end for any application by adapting to the data structures of the application. This is acceptable because printing doesn't have to happen at interactive rates and the abstract ideal of what is to be printed can never, ever, truly be realized by any real world printer (there is always a resolution limit). In contrast, for displays programmers expect pixel-perfect results between platforms and need interactive rates for their applications. They aren't willing to wait around for the rendering in return for some abstract ideal. Programs that are graphics intensive have always been willing to "code for the device" in order to obtain a little more speed. Noone complained if your graphics terminal had a funky escape sequence if it was FAST. Noone complained when SGI introduced a completely new graphics API library (it wasn't compliant with *any* standard, official *or* defacto!) because it was FAST. They didn't even care that the graphics API from SGI *only* ran on SGI hardware and had weird compatability issues between different models of SGI hardware. In a modern GPU, it's so crazy fast compared to the CPU at rendering stuff that for most applications they can embrance an ideal abstraction and not pay a performance penalty. However, if you're writing an immersive photorealistic 3D first person shooter, things are different. Even there, you'll find a convergence of concepts between the remaining APIs left standing (Direct3D and OpenGL); the board and chip makers are differentiating themselves by the broad strokes of their SIMD architectures, the performance of their individual SIMD units (can you do double precision floats at no penalty?), speculative execution of shader stages, advanced pixel culling to get effective increased fill rate and other innovations like adding more shader stages to the pipeline (hull, domain and compute shaders in Direct3D are the latest additions, before that it was the geometry shader) where it makes sense. I expect the next shader stage to be added to the pipeline is something that manages the animation of rigged characters for you; currently the CPU still traverse the bone structure of a rigged character and positions each bone during an animation cycle, i.e. a walking movement. OpenWindows is the rendering server (SunView, NeWS, and X11 compliant) that replaced the SunView server. SunView couldn't handle NeWS or X11 clients, only clients written for SunView. OLWM is a window manager. The two are very different. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWindows> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olwm> -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline> The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org> The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals.classiccmp.org> Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On 8/9/12 8:13 PM, Toby Thain wrote: do you have 800-2379-10_NeWS_2.0_Programmers_Guide_Aug89? I've got that scanned.

ITYM Wayland (not to be confused with Weyland-Yutani, who are currently developing some other kind of monster). Frankly Wayland doesn't interest me much, but I mostly deal with Unix through old X11 systems and OS X. I'm more interested in seeing where people take CDE, now that it is open source. Can't wait for Motif to join it finally (outside of OpenMotif and LessTif). -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- rm -rf /bin/laden ----------------------------------------------------------

I actually rather liked CDE, but this is due to my history with AIX and HP-UX, and may qualify as a mental illness. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Save a horse, starve a fever. Wait, what? -- Alex Payne --------------------