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

[Jon Steinhart]

Greg A. Woods writes:
>
> At Sun, 24 Jan 2021 12:45:13 -0800, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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.

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