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

[Clem Cole]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 11:15 AM ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> At some point I thought NeWS source was released. Is it just another
> Lost Source or it is out there somewhere?
>

As I have said in other replies: "simple economics always beats
sophisticated architecture."

I personally never saw the code, although I did play with the result at one
point.  I believe they licensed Adobe Display PostScript which was one of
the issues.  IIRC was also a trigger for creating Ghostscript.   We toyed
with using it for Stellar.   IIRC, Andy Van Dam was a big fan.



> Do I remember right that it was a Gosling effort?
>
Yep.

Like BLISS vs. C - NeWS did way more than X11 did when it first appeared
and it might have had a chance if Sun had not locked it up the same way DEC
did with BLISS.  Funny, they gave away NFS and basically set a standard
that they controlled.   I have to believe they made way more money selling
systems because NFS was ubiquitous than they would have with license
revenue for NFS.

I suspect NeWS was justified internally differently and the marketing types
saw it as a revenue stream.  Larry, can you enlighten us at all?
ᐧ
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20210124/26f089ce/attachment.htm>