3 ms·
NeWS was really cool. Back in 1987/88 I used an early release of NeWS for my final-year undergrad project. It was made a little more challenging by only havin
by mhandley 11y ago
NeWS was really cool. Back in 1987/88 I used an early release of NeWS for my final-year undergrad project. It was made a little more challenging by only having a photocopy of a pre-release of the documentation, that was missing all the diagrams.
The model was really cool - completely different from X11, which is much more limited. With X, your app runs on the client and sends drawing commands to the display server. With NeWS, you can split your app arbitrarily between the client and the display server. The client simply extends the server by sending it postscript functions to locally interpret when asynchronous events happen. So you can write new widgets, and they run entirely on the display server so get really low latency, while the rest of the app is running remotely over a piece-of-wet-string network connection.
You could be sitting in from of a display running a nice interactive GUI, with the app running in a different country or over a modem connection. At least you could if the application designer got it right. Getting the split of functionality between the client and server (and the communication between them) right was definitely more challenging than writing X apps, but the benefits were significant.
- arethuza 11y agoSpeaking of documentation - it was rather cool that when you purchased a Sun at that time (or maybe it was when you purchased OpenWindows) you can a set of official Adobe PostScript books (blue/red/green?).
- mcguire 11y ago8 1/2, from Plan 9, used a similar architecture, IIRC, because of the smart terminals it was written for. Check out the editor Sam for an example; one side is ed++, the other is the GUI.
- mveety 11y agoYou mean the Blit terminal. The Plan 9 window managers use a different architecture that takes advantage of Plan 9's design. Both are from Rob Pike though so they look basically the same.
- jonjacky 11y agoThere are emulations of the Plan 9 smart terminals that run under Unix-like operating systems. They are quite different from xterms - they have much simplified communication with the remote host but much richer local editing capabilities: http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~matty/9term/ http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~matty/9term/ https://github.com/chneukirchen/tt https://github.com/chneukirchen/tt The original Plan 9 terminal and window manager are described here: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/rio http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/rio
- anon4 11y agoIsn't this the exact thing we have now with web apps?
- digi_owl 11y agoSounds like what you get if you ran HTML5+CSS+JS as a desktop...
- baus 11y agoI've thought exactly the same thing. Gosling's NeWS was way ahead of its time and we ended up getting there again sort of by accident with the web.
- digi_owl 11y agoI dunno how much of it was by accident. I get the feel it was the aim of Netscape from the virtually the beginning. After all, the browser war was a proxy war for the server market and the intranet concept. As in using internet technology for the corporate LAN, with the web as the GUI for corporate servers.