[TUHS] X and NeWS history (long)

Jon Steinhart jon at fourwinds.com
Wed Sep 13 09:22:27 AEST 2017


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



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