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

[Greg A. Woods]

At Sun, 24 Jan 2021 12:45:13 -0800, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?
>
> 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.

I'm not so sure about that.

There was Project JADE from University of Calgary:

	http://hdl.handle.net/1880/46070

I rarely see it mentioned, yet it was in my experience quite far ahead
of its time in all aspects of distributed computing, complete with a
nice GUI able to run on generic bit-mapped display workstations and
using Unix servers.  The lack of knowledge about it dismays me somewhat
because I knew the guys who created it -- they were grad students at the
time I was an undergrad at UofC.

Now interestingly enough James Gosling would likely have known all about
this, since he kept ties with UofC for quite some time, and in the same
timeframe.  I remember sitting beside him in a terminal room at UofC
near xmas time in about 1980 or 1981 while he upgraded the version of
Gosmacs we used on the main undergrad 11/780.  That was about the time
that Project JADE was beginning too.

I don't know too much about the history of NeWS, except I didn't see
even a hint of it until long after JADE was already long in the tooth.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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