Larry McVoy writes:
The rest of your story is great, just one small correction. SunView started
as something Sun specific but it pretty quickly became a library on top of
X11. I'm not sure if it ever worked on X10, I think it did but I'm not sure.
Source: I've hacked up GUI interfaces for the SCM I did at Sun in Sunview.
This would have been around 1990, is that still X10 or X11?
Well, just to nitpick, I remember that much of SunView was a library but it
relied on special device drivers with complicated ioctls and such. I don't
recall that it be easily separated from the OS.
BTW, on a historically amusing note, I still have two old Sun machines in the
basement, a SparcStation 20 and an Ultra-60. The 20 has whatever graphics card
supported double-buffering. It has a modified kernel thanks to some unnamed
(and unremembered at this point) soul who provided source code. I hacked it so
that SunView ran in one of the buffers and X ran in the other. Moving the mouse
off of the edge of the screen switched which buffer was displayed. My answer to
being able to run both SunView and X.
I sure did, love to meet you some time, where are you?
I live in Oregon, about 50 miles southwest of Portland. I will probably be
in San Francisco the first full weekend of October for the Hardly Strictly
Bluegrass Festival if you're in the bay area. Will be staying at Sun employee
#5's house.
Jon