4 ms·

I've read a couple of books about Sun (maybe I should say, "both books about Sun") and my memory is that NeWS was considered significantly more elegant than X11

I've read a couple of books about Sun (maybe I should say, "both books about Sun") and my memory is that NeWS was considered significantly more elegant than X11 by many people who understood the problem space, and Sun was set on trying to make it an open standard as they did for NFS. However, Sun (and again this is just my memory) had left many in the industry feeling burned on its last big standards push, I believe this was around NFS, and I don't recall the details of why. But there was so much bad blood that NeWS had an uphill battle. And I recall clearly (from these books) that there was a conscious effort when Java came along to help it avoid the fate of NeWS. Also as Wikipedia notes the actual Sun implementation of NeWS carried a licensing fee; mind you, they had a fairly open posture toward licensing the source but they did charge, whereas MIT gave away X11 code. Anyway maybe someone can tell me how wrong I am here!

DonHopkins 6y ago
But you're right! ;) Here's the story about the fight to make NeWS free, and what finally happened (which sucked). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457490 Notice how NeWS and NFS are spelled almost the same (except for that pesky little "e") -- that was on purpose to draw a parallel between NFS and NeWS (whose original name was SunDew, which I always thought they should have stuck with). Unfortunately that got a lot of bad attention and drew a lot of fire from other companies like DEC who didn't want to see Sun pull another NFS. Here's "The NeWS Book"! It was written during the transition from NeWS 1.1 to X11/NeWS, so it has a chapter about porting NeWS to other platforms (like the Parallax live video graphics card, and SGI's 4Sight, the port of NeWS to the SGI Iris, as well as the port of NeWS to OS/2. It also has a forward-looking chapter on X11/NeWS architecture (X11/NeWS Design Overview). http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Boo...
- mapgrep 6y ago
  Another book for my collection, wonderful! I think SunDew is definitely the better name ... unless your goal is to make people forget the technology came from Sun. Of course, that didn’t happen anyway, so maybe they should have just stuck with SunDew!

DonHopkins 6y ago

But you're right! ;) Here's the story about the fight to make NeWS free, and what finally happened (which sucked). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457490 Notice how NeWS and NFS are spelled almost the same (except for that pesky little "e") -- that was on purpose to draw a parallel between NFS and NeWS (whose original name was SunDew, which I always thought they should have stuck with). Unfortunately that got a lot of bad attention and drew a lot of fire from other companies like DEC who didn't want to see Sun pull another NFS. Here's "The NeWS Book"! It was written during the transition from NeWS 1.1 to X11/NeWS, so it has a chapter about porting NeWS to other platforms (like the Parallax live video graphics card, and SGI's 4Sight, the port of NeWS to the SGI Iris, as well as the port of NeWS to OS/2. It also has a forward-looking chapter on X11/NeWS architecture (X11/NeWS Design Overview). http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Boo...

mapgrep 6y ago
Another book for my collection, wonderful! I think SunDew is definitely the better name ... unless your goal is to make people forget the technology came from Sun. Of course, that didn’t happen anyway, so maybe they should have just stuck with SunDew!