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.

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 08:39:13PM +0000, Ronald Natalie wrote: Abysmal? Perhaps a bit harsh. The Sun logo was hand written postscript and I did the first SPARC Cluster and made a logo that was 4 interconnected Sun logos in the same shape, I can probably dig it up. I think it was more weird, reminded me of Forth (also weird). But you could make stuff work in it.

On 1/24/21 1:54 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: I would be curious to see the clustered SUN logo if you could find it without much digging. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On 1/24/21 5:18 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: Thank you Larry. I put that into a sun-sun-sun-sun.ps file and opened it with gv / Ghostscript perfectly fine. Very nice! I like it. Do you mind if I share this with some friends, obviously giving you credit. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

Larry McVoy writes: Ugh, another flashback. Reload the brain from back-up tapes time. Yes, NeWS was primarily Gosling but Rosenthal was also a contributor. Remember that they did Andrew at CMU. Historical note on them versus the X-Men is that when they did Andrew, one of the first things that they addressed was that UNIX was asynchronous networking; they designed the protocol to avoid round-trips. Even though their work pre-dated a lot of the X work, X through V10 was stuck on the synchronous networking model since X was really just the W code developed for the V operating system. SunWindows/SunView was Sun's original window system that was kernel-based. There were a bazillion ioctls to get things done. But, it was fast and reliable. Ugly inside. A quick note is that the X-Men sold their stuff as "network-transparent" which I thought was really idiotic. Before X, lots of people did network transparent graphics with Tektronix 4014 terminal emulators. The main thing that X did for you was to have your whole UI run on a remote machine making the performance even worse than what the synchronous protocol provided. To the best of my knowledge, NeWS was the first window system to provide device-independent graphics. You could just do things without having to mess around with counting pixels and figuring out what sort of color system was behind things. As an aside, I found something when doing my basement archeology that pre-dated the X11/NeWS tee shirts; there was a color printer at Sun and I got Dave Lavalle to help me make a Christmas card for Gosling - it read "Wish you a merry X-Mess and a happy NeWS year". Could scan it in if anyone cares. To me, the biggest problem with NeWS was the "e" part; it was so extensible that nobody could stop playing around and finish something. I recall that they kept on redoing UI toolkits because they got into building an object-oriented system using PostScript dictionaries and kept changing things because they were learning as they went. The name Owen Densmore is connected to this in my mind. While there are many different views of what happened, mine is that the X-Men colluded to form the "Hamilton Group" in an attempt to used monopoly power to kill NeWS. One of the leaders of this was Apollo, and according to folks that I knew there, they felt that their networking was better than Sun's, but they lost because Sun "gave away" NFS. Folks were worried that Sun would do something similar with NeWS, and at the time there was little industry expertise, especially in the graphics department. I seem to recall that Sun bought some company that had figured out font-hinting along the line. Moving on, because of the Hamilton Group, Sun was forced into supporting X. They created X/NeWS on the assumption that X would just be a layer on top of NeWS and use much of the same code. Robin Schaufler was project lead. Problem was, the X graphics model of knowing exactly where each pixel was placed was not compatible with the NeWS model of not caring. Partly in reaction to this, the X-Men worked with Adobe on the Display PostScript extension. My recollection was that the original PostScript for Apple printers was pretty much written in assembler, and so it took a lot of work and time to get Display PostScript up and running. It was not a great fit for X as compared to NeWS as X with Display PostScript provided a different drawing model as a wart that wasn't well integrated with the rest of X. Display PostScript got a temporarily new lease on life with Next. XView was a project at Sun that converted SunView programs into X programs. I remember doing a late night panic consulting project because it came along around the same time as SPARC, and there was a lot of weird code in there doing unaligned memory accesses that needed fixing. In my opinion, the whole NeWS and X/NeWS thing failed because it was done in a market-insensitive manner. Among other things, I was doing some consulting for AED at the time; they were making X accelerator boards that plugged into Suns. I convinced them that there wasn't going to be much of a market. Instead, I noticed that many large companies were using SunView applications (think FrameMaker et. al.) for serious work, and were not just going to ditch it for X just so they could watch the maze program (there were no real X applications at the time). AED funded me to do the XTool (Safe X for Suns) project which made X run in a SunView window. That allowed customers who depended on SunView to also watch maze when they were bored. It had two modes; run an X server in a window, or use the Sun UI and run each X application in its own SunView window. Unfortunately, AED had a management change who forced us to ship before we were ready which made it fail. Were I smarter I would have tried to get Sun to buy it. I think that I have a box of XTool tee shirts around if anybody wants one. I don't know if the NeWS source was ever released. I have a QIC-150 tape labeled NeWS which I believe has the source. Have no idea what version or anything else, and I would have to haul my old SparcStation 20 out of the basement to try reading it as I don't have SCSI on any modern machine. John Gilmore might have a copy as I recall that he and Hugh Daniel were doing some sort of NeWS thing, Grasshopper Group if I remember right. Jon

Larry McVoy writes: So I never liked Apollos much. What I was referring to was Apollo's claim that their token-ring network performed better for large numbers of nodes. And they were correct. However, they didn't consider the eventually invention of switches that solved the problem. Jon

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 01:14:34PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote: The network performance of the cluster of Apollos we had was awful. I don't know anything about how you set that up, never liked token rings, maybe it is possible to set it up wrong, I dunno. All I know was network performance was awful on the Apollos. It's a statistically valid sampling of one case :-)

Dan Cross writes: This wasn't UNIX-y at all, it didn't come from UNIX despite having its origin in the original Stanford University Network machine. The problem isn't unique and is one of those things that I'm trying to help with via mentoring and such. The big question that few seem to consider is "Am I adding value with what I'm doing?" Even if people think about it, few are learning much about history despite our attempts here. I try to point out that learning the history is important so that instead of repeating mistakes that others have made one can come up with new and interesting mistakes. I remember trying to talk to Bob Scheifler about this and was stunned to hear him say "I don't believe in models because they predispose your implementation." As near as I could tell, he didn't look at anything anyone else had done (with the exception of the W code from Stanford) which is why he made all sorts of beginner mistakes. For example, had he been looking at other projects in the window space he would have seen how Gosling and Rosenthal designed the Andrew protocol to minimize network round trips. But it never seemed to cross his mind until others pushed for it in response to NeWS. These mismatches are everywhere today. Programming is more about learning secret incantations to make poorly designed stuff sort of work than it is about actual good design. At least in my opinion. BTW, one of my part time projects here which is currently low on the priority list is to fix this. I've done some prototyping of a "real UNIX philosophy" window system which looks a lot like some of the Plan 9 stuff. I map my desktop into a filesystem and use inotify to monitor changes. My goal, which so far seems achievable is to make a system that requires no new commands and works with all of the existing ones. Create a directory and fill it with some stuff to make a window. Delete it to get rid of it. Write the size and position into files in the directory to move and resize. And so on. Doing this, the window manager was only a couple of hundred lines of bash script. Going back to X versus NeWS in a way, one of the stumbling blocks is how things have gone back to device-dependent graphics. As near as I can tell (haven't done too much work here), it takes about a thousand lines of code using Vulcan to draw a simple straight line these days. Jon

Al Kossow writes: I think that X1 was W. But I was doing other stuff at the time and don't know for sure.

On 1/25/21 6:38 AM, Clem Cole wrote: If it is the stuff I have up on bitsavers, no it isn't. I wonder if Jim ever found a home for his archives. He talked to me/CHM about it years ago.

On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 10:55:34AM -0500, Richard Salz wrote: Still is, really. So far as I know, nobody has come up with anything better. That's the first I've heard of that and I really like it. Most of the time, you are on a network of machines that are the same, so why have a network byte order, reader makes it right will just work. Neat. --lm

It was only for native types https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9629399/chap14.htm The other things -- struct, array, pointers, etc -- have rules. See the link if you care for nitty-gritty details.

On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 11:37:25AM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: We did something similar, I hated Tcl so much I paid a friend to make a compiler for a very C like language that compiled to Tcl byte codes. It's really what I'd like to see C evolve to: http://little-lang.org Yeah, good points and I suppose that is why Sun did network byte order. It's still appealing to have reader make right if you can do it, though with todays out of order CPUs providing a pretty high instructions per cycle maybe it just doesn't matter. There is a paper waiting to be written. --lm

On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 07:24:53AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: It is if you like C syntax and you like perl usefulness. It's sort of a blend of those. Has some short comings but I like it.

On Mon, 25 Jan 2021, Dan Cross wrote: Tcl is a perfect example of how *not* to design a language; Tk is wonderful (and I'm starting to use Perl/Tk; it's a great combinaion for GUI tools). -- Dave

Richard Salz writes: Just in case someone has been living under a rock and hasn't heard this one... We're lucky that Don Knuth had nothing to do with X? Why? He would have called it ecccchhhhh.

Dave Horsfall writes: Well, as I've said before, I think that it's our job as geezers in the field to help younger folks learn to design and build things in a better way. Hard to figure out how to do this effectively given the huge push to turn out lots of low-quality coders so that they don't have to be paid much above minimum wage. Found a listing on actual prehistoric line printer paper that seems to indicate that my copy of the NeWS source, if readable, dates back to 1985. Don't know what the provenance of this code is; it's not something that I had around from doing some work on X/NeWS so I'm not sure why I have it. One of the things that I'll hopefully find during basement archeology is a paper by Gosling about a tool that we wrote to go along with NeWS. Don't remember what it was called, but it was a preprocessor that allowed one to specify things about the (graphics) hardware, and would, for example, automatically unroll certain loops where there would be a benefit. This allowed different hardware to be driven efficently from a single hunk of source code without #ifdefs all over the place. Also, I do have a couple of notebooks of stuff from V and W that I can scan in if it's not available elsewhere. Oh, wow, and an original IRIS-4D paper from Silicon Graphics, and the programming manual for Imagen laser printers. Jon

Also to this, I think much was lost, when the Andrews X system lost impetus. The filesystem lived on (they always do) but somehow, people lost interest in WYSIWYG built around the X fonts, and Troff. I rather liked it, used it heavily. I produced the university Phonebook for a while in it, and adjunct scripts. (EQN for some things) There was a rather nice animation tool, somebody obviously either was, or was dating a ballet major at the uni, and decided to code something pretty: the worked example was very dance-oriented. (I know this is a layer "up" from X itself, but it goes to what might have been, if the critical mass had been there)

On Wed, 27 Jan 2021 at 00:49, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: -Henry

On Tue, 26 Jan 2021, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote: W, X, Y, Z ("Zee" for Yanks :-) -- Dave

On 01/27/21 13:32, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote: Borenstein wrote a book ("Programming as if people mattered: Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions") in which he mused about W and X and Andrew. (A very nice read but horribly expensive -- fortunately I bought it when PUP had reasonably priced paperbacks.) N.

On 1/27/21 10:47 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: Neither did mine I had an original Altair 8800 I had built and started with CP/M 2.2 then upgraded to 3.0 and wrote my own bios and flashed into a prom board I had built from kit. Computers were sure a lot simpler in those days. -- "They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Ben Franklin) "The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases." (Thomas Jefferson) "Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy!" (Ben Franklin)

On 01/25/21 21:45, John Conan wrote (in part): I would beg to differ. Have you ever seen the ASN.1 in the various crypto standards? (This mess is independent of PER.) N.

On 29/01/2021 17:02, Dave Horsfall wrote: BER does not work for digital signatures (because encodings are not unique), hence DER. N.

PER is not the reason for the hatred of ASN.1, it's more that the specs were created by a pay-to-play organization that fought against TCP/IP, the specs were not freely available for long years, BER was too flexible, and the DER rules were almost too hard to get right. Just a terse summary because this is probably off-topic for TUHS.

On Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 09:39, Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote: The reference port for X10 was certainly a VAXstation (I/II/GPX). I've compiled and run X10 and X11R1 on SIMH's microVAX II emulation running Ultrix 2.3; my recollection is that it all works right out of the box. Wikipedia says "DEC, then preparing to release its first Ultrix <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix> workstation, judged X the only windowing system likely to become available in time. DEC engineers ported X6 to DEC's QVSS display on MicroVAX <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroVAX>." To me that's unclear if there already was an Ultrix / uVAX port of some other nature or if that was the first iteration. https://www.talisman.org/x-debut.shtml states that the original X was for the VAXstation 100. I have no idea what OS it would have been running; a release date of 1983 for the VS100 would predate Ultrix 1.0. -Henry

On 1/24/21, Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote: Until you got over 10% utilization or so, then token-ring would blow the doors off anything else. At least that was our benchmarking results.

Jon Steinhart wrote: Maybe this? I pulled it out of comp.sources.sun postings. https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/sunview-x-mazewar

Greg A. Woods writes: Thanks, I had forgotten about that. The question of device independent graphics is a hard one. Device independent graphics had been around for a long time in terms of various display list processors that got mangled into things like CORE, GKS, and PHIGS. But just because, for example, Sun provided a GKS package on top of SunView didn't make SunView device independent. You're probably correct that NeWS was not the first window system to support device independent graphics. I do believe that it was the first one to be "ubiquitous" in that the window system itself used the same graphics as was available to the user. Doesn't that document just scream "troff" at you? Jon

On 2021-01-24 12:04 p.m., Clem Cole wrote: As far as I know, they didn't. It was a different implementation. They did develop the F3 font rasterising engine as part of the project, iirc. --Toby

Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Indeed they did. I think I have a CD with it somewhere in my basement.... I am pretty sure it was the X11 version, not sunview. I don't think NeWS ever got released. Arnold

Yes and no. I actually had JavaScript (which I _knew_ that Brendan Eich wrote; sigh) in mind. JavaScript, like NeWS, handles a wide range of display and interaction issues. Of course, it sits on top of HTTP, but that's just a detail (:-). -r