Unixen history (was Solaris/x86 rant)

[Henry Hall]

> 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.

Actually I'm pretty sure this was a "post-cessor" as DPS was implemented 
as an extension (under X11r4) while NeWS used PostScript as inline basis 
of it's rendering protocol (which iirc resulted in lower bandwidth 
before LBX (Low-bandwidth-X) came about.

> 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.

And though it was a rich toolkit for its time, that time (and its APIs) 
have thankfully passed.