Unixen history (was Solaris/x86 rant)

[Tom Buskey]

On 6/25/07, Henry Hall <h_hall at att.net> wrote:
>
> Only a few historical rants to add:
>
> Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:
> >> And there's the retro naming of SunOS 4.x to Solaris 1.x.
> >
> > ummm, that was way more than a "retro naming".
> >
> > SunOS was based on the BSD kernel and the BSD code, modified a long time
> > under Sun.
> >
> > Solaris was based on System V.4, with Sun ripping it apart and basically
> > re-writing it.
>
> Wasn't there a windowing system change about this time as well?


Sun called their window system NeWS (Network extendable Window System).
IIRC it was a predecessor of Display Postscript.  James Gosling worked on it
& it pointed out security issues with network executables that got addressed
when he developed Java.

An X11 emulator ran on top of NeWS and I think it was called OpenWindows
(I'm sure I'll be corrected here).  Sun (& AT&T) had a Motif competitor
called OpenLook.

Real X11 (r5?) was included around Solaris 2.4 I believe and NeWS was
dropped in 2.5 (my NeWS based printers no longer worked).  OpenWindows is no
longer shipped either.

I was in a shop that had lots of X-terminals.  Sun could've made lots of $$$
here if they had a product.  We had Xterminals from NCD, Visual, HP and DEC.

/me recalls McNealy's rant about "Sun will never run X Windows" just a
> couple of years before his next rant about "Sun will never run Motif".


And Motif is largely irrelevant today.  Sun is using gnome and phasing out
CDE.
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