Re: [TUHS] X and NeWS history (long)

Bakul Shah writes: Wow, big topic. Rather than getting into it in detail at the moment I'm curious as to why you think that it's important for it to work over a network. Before you bite my head off for that question, I'm not suggesting that there's no value in taking data from somewhere on a network and using it on a local machine. Back in the darker ages of the Green Flash (Tektronix storage tubes like the 4014) it was common to display remote data on a local system. The data in those days arrived via RS-232. Depending on the application, one could shovel 4014 commands over the wire or just raw data and use a local program to generate drawing commands. I've never been convinced that the way that X did it made sense. Sure, you'd here people say things like "your remote Cray can draw stuff on your local screen." But it wasn't just that; using X your Cray also had to draw and manage your user interface: scroll bars, buttons, and so on unless you wanted to create a separate protocol so that you could run your user interface locally and have it communicate with the remote application. Of course, X was enough of a pig that maybe using a Cray to drive a scroll bar made sense :-) So before getting off into graphics APIs I think that it would be interesting to hash this out. BTW, one of the best things about NeWS was the fact that with a reasonable set of conventions the user interface personality could live in the server and be applied to all applications. Contrast that with X where each application links in a UI library, and if your screen looks anything like mine there isn't a lot of consistency because different applications use different libraries. One of the problems with NeWS was that this was so much fun to play with that the people doing the work kept on coming up with new ideas faster than they could implement the old ones so there was difficulty completing toolkit projects. Jon