🚀 go-pugleaf

hugh@rschp1.anu.edu.au (Hugh Fisher) writes:

   From: hugh@rschp1.anu.edu.au (Hugh Fisher)
   Date: 17 Jul 92 01:25:22 GMT
   Organization: Research School of Chemistry, ANU

     Apologies if you've already seen this: we had a network problem
     while I was posting the first time.

     I think that one of the major reasons NeWS never took off is that
     the PostScript imaging model, while superb for DTP, doesn't match
     the reality of workstation hardware. The original NeWS Technical
     Overview stated that programmers ought to be working with a
     device independent coordinate and color system. However, image
     processing and video/animation type applications must work with
     real pixels and real colormaps, whether the designer likes it or
     not (this point was made by Bob Scheifler on the X group a while
     back).

Sounds like B.S. to me.  You can certainly do a lot with raster graphics
in NeWS. Run "$OPENWINHOME/demo/rap" some time, then try to port it to X.
NeWS has extensions for handling colormaps, shared memory, raster files,
etc.  I've written a video interface for NeWS, and plenty of application
that do raster animation: SimCity for example. Soon I'll post my cellular
automata machine for HyperLook (in the guise of a virtual Lava Lamp), to
show what NeWS can do combining client side raster animation with server
side PostScript graphics, through shared memory.

     The same applies to window managers: I don't think it would be
     possible to write an X style window manager in NeWS as originally
     designed.

Another misconception.  OpenWindows version 1 was delivered with a crude
Open Look X window manager almost completely written in PostScript. When
we were at Sun, Josh Siegel wrote a much nicer faster one for OpenWindows
version 3, that had rooms, scrolling virtual desktops, pie menus, etc.
It'll never see the light of day though, because of internal Sun politics
(which is the real reason NeWS did not take off).  Read "Methodology of
Window Management" to learn how NeWS is better suited for window
management than X.

     Even DTP applications occasionally have to worry about exact pixel
     alignment for fine lines.

They just use "dtransform" and "idtransform", as documented in the red book.

     This is a pity, because the other main idea in NeWS, downloading
     programs into the server, was and is a good idea. Perhaps NeWS
     would have succeeded if Sun had made it an extension to X, rather
     than a competitor.

Sun did merge NeWS and X.  It was a political failure, not technical.

	-Don