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Not at all. Irix was a fairly standard System V-derived Unix that ran on Silicon Graphics hardware, which typically was specially built for high graphics perfo
by gamache 11y ago
Not at all. Irix was a fairly standard System V-derived Unix that ran on Silicon Graphics hardware, which typically was specially built for high graphics performance.
NeXTSTEP broke with Unix tradition in many ways, notably using Display PostScript rather than the X Window System for display, offering Objective-C rather than vanilla C as the primary systems language, and attempting to provide a friendly WIMP interface as the primary mode of usage rather than the somewhat primitive windowmanagers in use on Unixes at the time. The NeXT hardware, in contrast, emphasized multimedia features (like CD audio, megapixel display, and desktop publishing) over graphics rendering performance.
- dalke 11y agoIRIX UI displays were based on Display PostScript, before SGI switched to X.
- gamache 11y agoHuh, I did not know that! You're right, looks like DPS and X got merged in during IRIX 4.x.
- mrpippy 11y agoSGI's X server (Xsgi) continued to support the DPS X extension up through 6.5.22. It was removed after that, either for licensing or support reasons depending on which rumors you believe. Some of the Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator) used DPS.
- dalke 11y agoI still remember how neat it was to type PostScript into a console window and see the result appear on the root window.
- kps 11y agoSun's NeWS previously used Postscript extended with an event system. Of course that meant a heavyweight display client running arbitrary code in an interpreted Turing-complete language communicating with application backends over a network, and something that ridiculous could never catch on.
- protomyth 11y agoOn the serious side, it would have made an interesting alternate to the web.
- icedchai 11y agoAnd what we have today with HTML/CSS/JS is better, right? ;)
- TickleSteve 11y agointeresting parallel... yes we should scrap the JS/HTML/CSS mess and go back to straight PS.... ;o)
- kps 11y agoThat was the target, yes. NeWS was too big and too slow, but what we ended up with instead is ten times slower, a hundred times larger, and a thousand times uglier. The promise of the world wide web of target-independent structural markup turned out to have its fingers crossed.
- gcb0 11y agoirix5 or 6 had the system settings application as a Mozilla xul application running JavaScript. that was early nineties
- icedchai 11y agoEarly 2000's maybe. Xul wasn't around until 99 or so.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThat's what I said about centralized computing rooms with big iron racks that charged per account for specific amounts of data served to dumb clients over a network. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft say they've never heard of these mainframes. I swear something looks familiar about their feature sheet, though. Probably best not to give them any more ideas. ;)