Unixen history (was Solaris/x86 rant)

[John Abreau]

On Mon, June 25, 2007 4:19 pm, Tom Buskey said:

> 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.
>

Ah, yes, NeWS. Back in 1986 I worked at a startup that was porting
NeWS to MacOS, as a drop-in replacement for Quickdraw. The idea was
to turm the Macintosh into a cheap NeWS-terminal; as expensive as
the MacPlus was at the time, it was still much cheaper than a
low-end Sun workstation.

Alas, like many startups, the company went belly-up before we could
launch the product.

I seem to recall Steve Jobs vehemently denying that the name "NeXT"
meant "NeWS++", like the way "HAL" was rumored to mean "one step ahead
of IBM".


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