[TUHS] OLIT, MoOLIT, and NeWS (was: X11 Conservancy Project)

[Jon Steinhart]

arnold at skeeve.com writes:
> josh <joshnatis0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS, which
> > > I never saw in the flesh.
> >
> > Branden,
> >
> > You may find this fellow’s archaeological dig on NeWS and PostScript
> > interesting: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/788053163857379328
>
> The link there gets to https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM
> which has NeWS and a bunch of other stuff. Possibly worth copying
> into the TUHS archive.
>
> Arnold

Ah, 'tis the season for old past follies.

Somewhere I have an old Christmas card that Dave Lavalle helped me make
for James Gosling using NeWS and taking advantage of the color printer
that had somehow been justified.  I'll scan it when I find it.  The
text of it was "Merry X-Mess and a Happy NeWS Year".

Related to all this, the original PostScript source has recently been
made available.

My major beef with NeWS was that it perpetuated the awful X input model
where everything had to be rectangles.  NeWS greatly improved graphics
but not input.  Being an ancient graphics person, I thought that it should
have followed the "pick identifier" model from the traditional (light pen)
vector graphics days where identifiers could be associated with objects
that were reported when they were selected.  NeWS could have done amazing
things by adding a pick identifier to the graphics context, and in the
PostScript way having that be polymorphic.  Would have greatly simplified
a lot of user interaction programming to be able to associate a function
with an object, and to not have to have a bazillion separate input
rectangle for each part of a window border and so on.

Jon