Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 12:04:09PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: NeWS was too much, too soon. This was back in the days of Mhz rather than Ghz and NeWS was slow and clunky whereas X11 was good enough. I don't know what the deal was with locking it up. I don't even know if they got any revenue out of it, the only people that I remember liking it were sort of "zealots" for lack of a better word. They felt like it was better answer and just had mumble, mumble when performance was brought up. But I'm a weird person to ask because I started my career as a contractor at Lachman and the first thing I did on any project was bring up X10, later X11, and use that. I'm still carrying around my startx stuff. To me, having the same UI on every platform dramatically out weighed any "advantage" $VENDORS window system had. And in reality, if you had decent frame buffer drivers, X11 was usually faster than the VENDOR stuff. So I have little insight into VENDOR UI, I rarely used it for longer than it took me to build X11. The only UI stuff I've ever seen that I liked better that X11 was: Sunview (the X version) because of the clever UI, every interface was widget(key, value, key, value) and all keys (if I remember correctly) had defaults that were reasonable. Super pleasant. Ousterhout's Tk (but not the tcl stuff, jesus that was horrible). He approached GUIs from a much higher level and you can throw together working tools in very few lines of code. I've still never seen anything as well thought out though I haven't looked in the last ~5 years. It wouldn't surprise me at all if his stuff is still the best.