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Unix Operating Systems Software

What GUIs Came Before X11? 152

Posted by Cliff from the knowing-your-history dept.
Avi Bercovich asks: "We all know the base facts about X11. Built by Scheifler and Gettys et al at MIT and DEC, for look 'n feel impaired, networked bitmap displays. But what about the details? Now it would seem from what I've read that it has roots in X10 and something called W. But I've had a hard time finding out anything online about these ancestral systems. Where are there articles published on these systems? So who's got the lowdown, URL-pointers or juicy personal stories on our GUI/Windowing pre-history?" (There's more...)

"I'm sure that X11/10 and W weren't the only windowing systems around. I know there was something called NeWS - a sort of windowing postscript - that according to legend - duked it out with X11 and lost. Even earlier there where 'sketchpad' and the famous Engelbart 5 fingered mouse demo, but I think that those systems were developed even before we where blessed with Unix. And what _was_ XEROX up to when Jobs & Co. came to visit? Either way, there must've been a whole bunch of proprietary and/or research GUI windowing environments out there before X and its extentions swept the Unix board."
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What GUIs Came Before X11? More

What GUIs Came Before X11?

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  • (and was not NeWS based.)

  • LISP Machines (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:31AM (#1075402)
    Pioneers in hires bitmap displays with a GUI, still unequalled today, there were these LISP Machines, originally developed at MIT, then at companies such as Symbolics [symbolics.com] (re-read the relevant chapters of Steven Levy's "Hackers" for the sad story of free software becoming proprietary software). Users of LISP machines say they are still unequalled today in many ways.

    Here are a few people's pages about Lisp Machines, for the curious (Some links are MIA; can anyone find a new valid address for them?):

    The curious can acquire an old LispM or a NuBus board from Symbolics for $600; the rich can acquire a license for OpenGenera running on top of a Tru64 Alpha for a mere $5000... Maybe a university near you has one somewhere.
  • Emacs is the ultimate windowing system. I haven't gotten around to write a window manager in elisp yet, but I'm sure there's somebody out there that would do it. :)

    Both gwm [inria.fr] and the more recent Sawfish [sourceforge.net] are extensible window managers which are implemented in an elisp-like language.

    Somebody suggested, as a 'blue-sky' feature for GNOME a while ago, a kind of Emacs window manager where you have each app open in its own buffer and switch between them with C-x b, C-x o and so on. For the special case of shell buffers, we already have this. Something like a VNC [att.com]-mode for XEmacs would probably allow you to implement this fairly easily.

  • Windows-E - is that like Windows CE?
    Some of us don't have a keyboard that has those 'other' keys (too old - 1995, or the fact that they just get in the way... that's the handrest area of the KB).

    Posting on an old thread... oh well...
  • I used Enable Virtual Desktop. Not bad. Shareware. Along with a few other hacks, you can almost get your windows desktop as useful as fvwm!

    Alt-ESC to lower a window?! No mouse click?!
  • Ah, the same arguments for my Trackball!

    oh well. I find the trackball to be far more accurate after a little practice.

  • The DDOS attacks were caused by known vulnerabilities which could easily have been patched. However big companies like CNN.com,etc do not hire people who care about these things, they hire paper MCSE's.

    Big companies very often have clueless admins who rely on the expertise of tech support from companies they have bought large support contracts from. The problem with this is that being bad admins they have no concept of maintenance.

    Bottom line, a good admin is on the lookout for security announcements, especially when they come from site that post a script to take advantage of the exploit. If you can get it, the script kiddies can too. PATCH!

    And don't use Microsoft on the DMZ/Firewall/etc because they take too long to release patches, sometimes years. Pointy haired bosses may care more about who the support contract is from than what security is available, but a good admin will care about security.

  • Egad! I thought I was the only one who ever slogged their way through MLX! It was worth it though to get a "feature-rich" word processor like Speedscript, which I actually used for college papers up until about `91 or so.

    Ahh... the days before bloat...

    Does anyone know if there are any Xerox PARC PCs still functioning? I saw one on a documentary a couple of years ago.

    -Cybrex
  • > Ah, the same arguments for my Trackball!
    Go figure :)

    > I find the trackball to be far more accurate after a little practice.
    Hmmm. Took me about a day back in the "Doom" days to pickup the mouse skills. How long did it take with the trackball ?

    Which model are you using ?

    I've been thinking about picking up the trackball, but have held off since the keyboard+mouse combo worked so well.

    Cheers
  • When I first started at CMU, in 1990, WM and X were both in use. When you logged on, the default .cshrc would ask you if you wanted to start X, or WM. It recommended that if you were on a workstation with more than 8 megabytes of RAM, you should run X, otherwise, WM.

    In those days Unix was completely mystical to me and I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. At first I used WM because I was afraid there might not be more than 8 megs in the workstations I was using (old Sun 3_35 systems I believe) but eventually I graduated to X.

    X and WM looked and behaved similarly, especially given that the majority of applications available were Andrew applications (clocks, email clients, the EZ (crappy) word processor, etc), and they looked and worked the same in both systems.

    But here was the thing about WM: it had NO OVERLAPPING WINDOWS! Meaning that you could have multiple windows open, but they would all take up their own area of the screen. WM gave the illusion of a desktop since there was a small gap between windows through which you could see the desktop background (which was generally just black), but if you opened a new window, the others would shrink down to get out of its way. So you ended up with a sort of grid of non-overlapping windows on your display.

    I remember that most of the CS geeks laughed at WM for that reason, and that it did not last long. By the time I was a junior, I think it had been retired.
  • I'm presently using a Logitec Trackman Marble (basic - no scroll wheel). I used the scroll wheel for a while, and I love it for some things, but it really bothers me sometimes. Oh well. I had been using a Microsoft Mouse (2.0a) before that. Only two buttons, but, to this day, the best mouse I've ever laid palms on. Nice, solid feel, good shape, good motion. The trackball kept my wrist from getting sore, and I don't have problems with dirty rollers, etc.. Plus, I can use more of my workspace for my other clutter 8^)

    The trackball is a little tough to pick up in a day, since you have to fiddle with the sensitivity for a while in normal 2-D land to get used to it, but it's well worth it (if you spend a lot of time at your computer, I'd say about two-four days isn't an unreasonable curve. There are some moves I've been able to do with a trackball that I never accomplished with a mouse - I like the speed and precision. Of course, there were many who were better at Q-II than I was, but I managed a fair number of frags on the stanford fvf server (back in the day)...
  • WM came up, by default, in 'tiled' mode, which
    you describe. It could be turned off, but I
    actually enjoyed tiling at the time. Less time
    pushing windows around!.

    (WM user from 1986 to 1989. ATK user 'till
    1996!)

  • I put a screenshot from my SPARCstation 1 running SunView
    http://php.indiana.edu/~jasomill/sunview.gif
    (and yes, I still use the system, incl. SunView; when all you're running is terminal windows, SV is oh, so much faster than the console [which, on the SS1 at least, is so painfully slow as to be virtually unusable] or X, especially on a SS1 with 16MB of RAM). The OS version is SunOS 4.1.4, and the Lisp Screen in the background is running the Copycat AI program (more info see "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" by Doug R. Hofstadter).
  • I'd like to point out that the long-term plan for emacs includes switching from elisp to a modern, lexically-scoped lisp -- almost certainly guile. Add that to scwm, the guile-based wm, and viola! (Btw, there's already a GuileEmacs, so you can get this environment today if you want!)
  • This is a shame. I haven't used the Amiga for many many years. I still own my lovely Amiga 1200 anyway; unfortunately it's in my family's house.

    I must have been confused because of the ever increasing size of RAMs these days. On the Amiga500 we used to do quite well with 512K of RAM, and I could compile C++ proggys on Amiga1200 with only 2 megs of RAM!

  • I also remember an object oriented programming model in the recent versions of AmigaOS, what was that called?

    BOOPSI - Basic Object Oriented Programming System for Intuition. First appeared in AmigaOS 2.0, I think. Compared with the rest of the OS this one was a relatively inefficient design: methods were passed up through every classes' method handler even if they had no intention to handle them, ever. Nothing like a table lookup anywhere in sight.

  • When Doug Englebart was doing his initial Augment/NLS research, he tried a lot of different pointing devices before he came to the mouse. He tried head tracking, foot pedals, even some sort of device that attached to your knee. All of these proved awkward, so eventually he came up with the simple mouse. Apparently, the original mouse was a a little square box with a big red button on top, and the cable coming out the back quickly earned it the nickname "mouse".

  • It never went up to 1MB, the ROM. In the very beginning it was 256k, on a5oo and forwards it was always 512k. The only machines with more than 512k on ROM was the CDTV and the CD32, but that was just becasue they had a second ROM with CD-player software on them (lots of gfx)

  • Hmmm....this means that X windows is a second system. [slaps head]
  • That study sounds interesting. Do you know where it could be found?

    One problem for me is that the Windows Explorer has no direct shortcuts. (Just that alt-f then m for rename type shortcut, which isn't much of a shortcut at all.) Coming from a Mac background as I do, this seems silly -- because it unnecessarily slows users down.

    I end up using my mouse mostly to swap between various apps and files, because the alt-tab in windows doesn't tell me which of the three SSH windows or four Netscape windows I'll be jumping into, given their little icons. If I could swap between windows based on their order on my taskbar (like alt-f1, alt-f2, like swapping between shells in Linux), that would make life easier. Has this already been implemented and I'm just ignorant of it? Any way to do it?

    -- Diana Hsieh

  • X Origins (Score:4)

    by Iluvatar ( 89773 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:42AM (#1075421) Homepage
    You can get the original publication about X, which contains many references to papers about the predecessors from the ACM Digital Library [acm.org] (account needed). The paper is:
    Robert W. Scheifler, Jim Gettys, The X Window System, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 5(2), April 1986, pp 79-109
    The paper is ~30 pages long and contains an excellent description of why X were designed like they were, and also a quite candid critique of the system's shortcomings by their authors. There is about 1+ page of history.

    A brief quote from the intro: "At Stanford University, Paul Asante and Brian Reid had begun work on the W window system as an alternative to VGTS for the V system. Both VGTS and W allow network-transparent access to the display, using the synchronous V communication mechanism" [(c) ACM 1986]. More references:
    P Asente, W Referece Manual, Internal document, Dept. of Comp. Science, Stanford Univ., 1984 KA Lantz, WI Nowicki, Structured Graphics for Distributed Systems, ACM Trans on Graphics, 3(1), Jan. 1984, pp 23-51
    W Nowicki, Partitioning of Function in a Distributed Graphics System, PhD Thesis, Dept of Comp Science, Stanford Univ, 1985
    D Cheriton, The V Kernel: A Software Base for Distributed Systems, IEEE Software, 1(2), April 1983, pp 19-42

    I also found some surprising references, such as the one with James Gosling (of Java fame), in his youth (while a student at CMU):
    J Gosling, D Rosenthal, A Window-Manager for Bitmapped Displays in Unix, in Methodology of Window-Managers, FRA Hopgood etal Eds, Springer-Verlag, NY, 1986
    J Morris, M Satyanarayanan, M Conner, J Howard, D Rosenthal, F Donelson Smith, Andrew: A Distributed Personal Computing Environment, CACM, 29(3), Mar. 1986, pp 184-201
    Andrew was a windowing system developed independently at CMU at about the same time X and Athena were being developed at MIT. Eventually, X dominated and an emulation layer was written for Andrew, to be able to run it's UI on top of X. ;-)

    A number of these are available online from ACMs DL. Otherwise, a trip to the library will probably provide you with more info than you need to know! ;-)

  • Any have any good ideas for pointing devices built into a keyboard? My suggestion (free for the taking) is to build pressure sensitive pads into the wrist rest, or the feet of the keyboard. You would thus move the cursor by pushing or pulling the keyboard in the direction you want to go. No one's ever used that idea as far as I know, though.
  • I agree with you about the drawbacks of the mouse, but I hate the eraserhead with a passion--not quite up there with Microsoft, but fierce nonetheless. It has such a small range of motion that it requires major acceleration to be bearable, but that in turn means that fine control is impossible.

    Do I have an idea? Well...one can move one's thumb about a fair amount while keeping fingers on the home row, so how about a thumb-driven touchpad just south of the spacebar?

  • A common thread across all of these (perhaps save for Fresco) is that Licensing Is Really Important.

    Fresco showed that language was very important. C++ didn't have the popularity of C, nor the stability, and certainly not the pre-standard portability. Hard to use a language that's a moving target. By the time C++ achieved a sense of stability (and g++ even more so), Motif had "won the unix desktop" (though CDE would still be 2 years away), and Doug Young's classic text on Motif + C++ had dominated the C++ based GUI development world within X.

    I respect what Fresco tried to do, but it was too much for most systems (my 16 meg ultrix box had a hell of a time compiling it) and too much most programmers to deal with at the time, and by the time it would have achieved something, the pressure from MS to "standardize" had locked out all non-Motif solutions until a different audience with a different agenda came along (re: linux, kde, gnome).

    Side note: Finding out now that C++/Java programmers are STILL rare in the industry, fewer still appearantly in the Open Source community (how many open source projects use C++? Even with GTK--, I've yet to see a potentially major GNOME component be built in C++).

  • > why does anyone still try and use a mouse for quake?

    a) 1 word: Logitech
    b) 2 words: sensitivity 40
    c) 3 words: 4 button mouse (It took a week for it to dawn upon me that the mouse-wheel was actually a button. Doh !)

    > don't you know thats what trackballs are for. much better controll no 'lifting and moving the mouse'
    I've been play Quake since 1996 and have never had to "lift and move the mouse" due to the above.

    Cheers
  • I use the command line too. Actually 4Dos & 4NT. www.jpsoft.com [jpsoft.com]

    I created this handy alias for when I need to use the explorer shell:

    alias explore=`explorer /e,.`

    The /E is the command to have the left pane show the directory tree, and the ,. has the current directory selected. The single quotes are the back quotes.

    Windows-E is also another handy keyboard shortcut.
  • The "N" guys had a further constraint, that being that they both had dependancies on Display Postscript, from Adobe.

    NeXT did, but Sun didn't - NeWS contained an PostScript implementation of its own, not any from Adobe, and NeWS was not, as I remember, a compatible superset of Display PostScript ("superset" - the PostScript in NeWS included operators to handle input events, so you could download a program to a server that would respond to keyboard and mouse events and do work on the server, rather than the client having to handle all input events).

    (The latter parenthetical note brings to mind NeFS, which Brent Callahan at Sun came up with - think "PostScript with the imaging model removed and a file system model put under it", so that NeFS requests consist of PostScript programs sent to the server and interpreted by the server.)

  • Well, don't forget Sunview (Score:3)

    by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @05:28AM (#1075428) Homepage
    ...Sun's pre-X windowing environment. Although pretty hard to find in its original form, Xview is pretty much a straight port on top of X11 -- even the API calls are very Sunview-ish
  • The reason their servers are overloaded might be because they are being DDOS now. I'm not sure this is the problem but the same thing happened yesterday and they were being DDOSed then.
  • I can tell you NeWS came with Irix 3.2.2. I have an ancient SGI Personal Iris 4D/20 circa 1990. The GUI was pretty good for its day, I wish it was ported to linux or some other OS. Anyhow heres a screenshot I took.

    ftp://216.156.49.34/sgi.jpg

  • Then you apparently never use Word Processors (no, troff is not a substitute), nor do you use markup editors (no, TeX is not a substitute). Apparently you also:

    • Never edit photographs
    • Think pictures with your news are overrated
    • Italics and boldface add no extra information (emphasis is also overrated)
    • Of course, we could also talk about playing videos, viewing scanned documents, etc, etc, etc.

    Thank god the world is not run by people like you. We'd all be living in unpainted concrete cubes without any windows (pun intended). DrWiggy: "Go outside if you want to see outside! Color is just useless decoration! I'll have the last laugh with my concrete cube in the next earthquake, by god!"

    P.S. This is not to say that I never use CLI's... I use them quite often when programming. But for application work, frankly, I am not a savage.


    --

  • Heh! I should tell my boss about it. He likes to open three Konsole windows while he's coding, and after opening them he very carefully resizes two of them so that none of them overlap. Sounds like WM would save him some time (if only the KDE team can be convinced to port to it... :)

    --

  • If it stops bears and other nasties then it is ok with me if it only goes click.
  • This is why we still have the mouse. Let me see you beat me in Quake2/Quake3 with your trackpoint. On your comment about cts.. you should have your hands level with your desk. If not you should have some gel support, so you don't get it. I use to get pains on my old desk but once I got the pads it went away. My new desk is perfectly flat with my chair so I never get any pains.
  • I remember using MGR under minix on my Atari ST back in oooh, 1989 or so? Of course there's also the native Atari GUI, GEM. I've a feeling you can get the source for DR's GEMDOS now, but I may be wrong.

    See the MGR-Howto on any good linux doc site. It's one of the things that came out of Bellcore's labs.

    NeWS was another Sun thing, post SunView. I remember someone in the corridor asking me 'Hey Baz, whats news?' and being flummoxed by my response of 'Network Extensible Windowing System'. And if they'd said "What's new?" I would have said "13th letter of the Greek alphabet".

    Baz
  • This is all well and good... but what's wrong with raw vegetables? I hardly ever cook my food, and don't see how it adds enjoyment to eating...

    Sure, we could all live on raw veggies, but who wants to? I say cook my food, and my interfaces.
  • Your complaint about lack of shortcut keys brings up a point about the inefficiency of "modern" GUI's. You are absolutely correct, they cannot be called shortcut keys. What I do at work (where I have to use Windows sometimes) is just keep a DOS window open perpetually. I do everything in this window. This is the strength of the CLI, that it is very efficient for actually getting work done. As mentioned in another post, the GUI is great for graphics (irreplacable really) and word processing, etc. If you have a command line controlling a GUI (really nice in X), then you get the best of both worlds. A really efficient method of setting this up for Windows users is to change the SHELL=Explorer.exe line in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI to SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM (or to a PIF file, this may be necessary to get it to run in a window), that way you get all the functionality and none of the extra crap.
  • Darn! For once, I post a message that's moderated up, and I'm hit with a slashbug that makes it AC. Then I get Error:Undefined subroutine &Slash::selectStories called at (eval 72) line 2. and now an internal server error. Looks like the new server has got problems. Is it the $5000 in my message confusing some slash perl script?

    -- Faré @ TUNES [tunes.org].org


  • that alt-f then m for rename type shortcut, which isn't much of a shortcut at all


    Well it's not really a shortcut, it's a keyboard accelerator for the menus.

    The real shortcut key is F2 (which is used in heaps of apps - in Excel for editing a cell for example).
  • >And what _was_ XEROX up to when Jobs & Co. came to visit?

    When I visited PARC in the early eighties,...

    The Xerox PARC GUI lives on today as part of the free Squeak Smalltalk [squeak.org] environment.

    You can get a some idea of what things looked like back then (including seeing Smalltalk-72 in action) from the screenshots at: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/683 [gatech.edu]

  • Well, that's a typical attitude to people who are usually a lot older :P, and got too used to CLIs.

    GUIs offer many many advantages, every tried doing any form of drawing with the keyboard and text?

    You can tend to display HEAPS more information with GUIs without clutering than you can with text based systems, where the amount of individual symbols available is quite limited (sure you could remap them and form bitmaps - but then you're just going graphical in a lame sort of way).

    Even for programmers, having nice highlighting, different fonts etc for different parts of the source code can aid reading immensly. Hey you can't have intellisense (very easily anyway) without a GUI based system :) - intellisense being tooltips and popups of function signatures and class members.

    I suppose you could work with CLI, but why not make it easier on yourself? There are things which make it easier for humans, and though it might feel cool to make things difficult on yourself (if you even know you're doing that) but you can probably get a lot more work done making it easier on yourself.

    You can use GUIs, and not have to give up your CLI shells either.. xterm, cmd.exe etc

  • VWS (Score:1)

    by pjc ( 2413 )
    VAXstations in the 80s came with VWS (VAX Worksystem Software) which was a graphical environment.

    In fact a lot of people I worked with stuck with VWS when DEC introduced Xwindows (though they called it DECwindows) because X was just too clunky.

  • Re:What was NeWS (Score:3)

    by Fzz ( 153115 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:24PM (#1075443)
    NeWS was the Network-extensible Window System. I spent a year programming NeWS applications back around 1987, and have since programmed many X apps. I always thought the wrong technology won.

    It's been a while - forgive me if I get some of the details wrong. Basically NeWS consisted of a display server (much like an X server) that spoke postscript. Everything was done in postscript, from defining windows, drawing text, handling mouse events, etc. But the really nice thing was that the client could extend the postscript interpreter on the server. In the usual postscript/forth way, new commands can be defined and run, but the client could determine where they ran - if they were closely coupled to the data, it was best to define and run them on the client machine. If they were closely coupled to the display, best to define and run them in the server's postscript interpreter. So, for example, if your app wanted rubber-banding as you drag the mouse, then it was best to extend the server to do rubber banding. The commands associated with getting the mouse events and drawing the rubber bands would then all happen in the server causing no network traffic, and when the final rubber band position was ready, a single response would go back across the network to the client. In this way, interactive NeWS applications behaved nearly as well if the client was running on the other side of the planet as if it was running locally. At least for applications where the client and server could be relatively loosly coupled anyway. This wouldn't work well for GIMP for example unless almost all the rendering happened in the server, and for that quantity of data, postscript probably wasn't all that fast.

    Shame Sun didn't learn the lesson about open standards earlier, but at least they did learn and do things a little differently with Java.

    -Fzz

  • GEOS is still around thankyouverymuch as GEOWORKS [geoworks.com]. When it moved on to Intel machines it became (on 286 and above (?) anyway) a multitasking O/S with scaled fonts. It still shows up on the occasional desktop but mostly in handheld devices like the late Casio Zoomer (sort of a proto-Pilot), cell phones and the like.
  • On the subject of textmode windowing systems...

    Another really nifty one is TWIN (forget the URL). It uses ncurses and libgpm to create a console windowing system with widgets, scrollbars, etc - even overlapping windows.

    It comes with a terminal emulator and a few other apps; one of my friends has written a CD player for it (TWIN CD). Supposedly the API is really nice.

    Oh, and it has screen-like functionality - you can detach a TWIN desktop and reattach it on another tty (even over telnet/ssh, although no mouse over that).

    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
  • Love it. Here's my favorite quote from the Byte article "A Mouse With Modern Requirements," written in 1983 about the then-upcoming Windows 1.0:
    Microsoft Windows seems to offer remarkable openness, reconfigurability, and transportability as well as modest requirements and pricing.

  • Well, it was more than just a bunch of bitmapped TTY's but I'm not sure whether it qualifyied as a GUI. Probably about as much so as raw X. The idea was to download code to the Blit for execution locally, sort of like Java without the bytecode. The whole thing worked over serial lines so it got left behind pretty quickly as real networks became available.

    Here's a page with some info about the 5620 and related terminals: http://www.bell-labs.com/user/dwd/56 20faq.html [bell-labs.com]

  • No. You just need a lot of virtual consoles...

    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • I remember Andrew Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl) making a comment something to the effect that even though his window system for Amoeba(?) was smaller and faster than X, he couldn't prevail against the MIT juggernaut. I checked Tanenbaum's home page, but I didn't find any references. Perhaps someone could email him a question. [Amoeba is a distributed operating system that is available free-of-charge from ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba5.3/.)

  • You don't need a windowing envorinment to use graphical applications - programs run from a CLI are perfectly capable of switching between text and graphics modes on their own. int 10h is your friend.


    Yes but then why not have a windowing enviroment? If you don't you tend to fall into the "reinvent the wheel" scenario (which unix seems to do a lot even with X). Why not be consistant? You can have a GUI and switch to full text mode when you need to.
  • I think X won because Display Postscript was proprietary and expensive.

    My site had mostly NCD terminals and wasn't about to spend a fortune on Display Postscript licenses when a free alternative existed. I wish they felt the same way when they decided to replace the NCDs with PCs. Why use NT when Linux and BSD are still around.
  • Moderators: wrong information is not really "insightful".

    W was not an OS. W was a Window System. X replaced it (because W was proprietary).
  • Try out this [arstechnica.com] old article on Ars Technica about the issue. Basically, everything that holds true for Quartz also held true for Display Postscript. The originating markup language behind the display version has just changed from Postscript to PDF. DPS was WAY ahead of its time. I just hope Apple keeps the networked aspect of the rendering system or makes it easy to extend to do networking.
  • Whats the point of DOSing and DDOSing? It seems like a stupid way to waste you're own bandwidth
  • You must have never been a good Quake player. Mouse aiming is CRITICAL! :)

    why does anyone still try and use a mouse for quake? don't you know thats what trackballs are for. much better controll no 'lifting and moving the mouse'. .sig this

  • Emacs is basically a full-fledged operating system running a text-editor as a shell. Whaddya expect?? Of course it must be the first windowing system. And not only so, its successor, XEmacs, even extends its ASCII-graphic capabilities to real pixel-graphics! With this latest innovation, we finally have the XEmacs OS, a full-featured replacement for all other poor attempts at an operating system, like winblows, linsux, etc., as well as all other poor attempts at windowing environments like winblows, X, Mac, etc., ad nauseum.

    X is but a weenie off-shoot from the ultimate XEmacs OS. Not only the Emacs OS predates X, it will also ultimately be its replacement.

    Sarcasmometer reading: 1000


    ---
  • Some valid points, however on Italics and Boldface...

    Terminals can boldface (or close enough, doing a higerintensity colour). I've never really seen a difference in how I mentally process the emphasis of italics over boldface.

    But maybe that's just me...

  • Terminals can also underline which can be a satisfatory replacement for italics.



    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"
  • The scary thing about this is that if the same situation were to arise today, the story would be very different. With DMCA, UCITA, etc., IBM would almost certainly have been able not only to win licensing control from CMU, but also to prevent MIT from suceeding with the X project. Certainly, good software needs to evolve. Clearly, though, the only reason it's been able to do so is that the greed-inspired have had no way to stop it; Bill Gates famous phobia regarding "some guy in a garage" was actually well warranted. Until now.

    -Graham
  • I have won quite a few matches with my Logitech Trackman Marble, which isn't exactly a mouse. It's certainly better for Quake than a TRACKPAD!! How does anyone use those things? They make no damn sense, and peoples palms drag on them when they're trying to type!
  • Geos is still around as New Deal. Their URL is HTTP://www.newdealinc.com/ [newdealinc.com].
  • FYI, I can win against the computer (on "hurt me plenty mode") on my laptop w/ a trackpad on some levels.

    Ramble on!
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
  • You bet. Re: Ethernet, IIRC (it's been a long time since I read up on this last), it was developed largely from work that had been done on Hawaii's ALOHANET. There they were trying to network computers with radio while they were borrowing on work on the ARPANET, they just didn't think that it would work b/c of something to do with the packet collisions. Metcalfe took it a little further and it has eventually turned into a pretty damn good networking system.
  • ftp://216.156.49.34/sgi.jpg

    Irix 3.2.2 from an ancient SGI Personal Iris, that amazingly still works.
  • I saw a speech Kay (and Engelbart - woo hoo!) gave this winter. Kay said that what he had developed was actually this:

    For people who were typing, there was a standard keyboard. When you needed to mouse, you also moved your non-mouse hand onto a chording keyboard so that you could continue to get some stuff done, but once you finished your mousing, both hands go back to the real keyboard.

    Of course, he didn't USE the mouse as much as it gets used today - at least that was my impression. If he had, he might not have kept bothering with it.

  • Please, don't say "X-Windows", "XWindows" or such. It's not the correct name for the windowing system that XFree86 is compatible to. The proper name for it is either X11, X, X Window System, X Version 11 or X Window System, Version 11. See the man page (man X) if you don't believe me.

    Speaking of it as "X-Windows" is like calling the linux kernel "linux32.dll".

  • Well, some of us are better with the command line than others. Maybe "we" don't need GUIs, but I'm afraid that "I" do.

  • Terminals can boldface (or close enough, doing a higerintensity colour).

    Good point; I forgot about that. I haven't used Lynx is so long... does it process bold/emphasis tags as bold text?

    I've never really seen a difference in how I mentally process the emphasis of italics over boldface.

    Hmmm. I feel a difference, but it's hard to quantify. Now, when I read back that last sentence to myself, I pronounce "feel" with a little more "thoughtfulness" or perhaps "subtlety", and "quantify" with more "authority" and "weight". I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but they do feel different to me. :)


    --

  • Others have pointed out Don Hopkins' page on NeWS, which appears to be the best remaining reference to NeWS on the web...

    The Andrew WM has been pointed out...

    I'm not sure that anyone has pointed out NeXTstep/OPENSTEP, which is probably the other major option that was considered highly innovative.

    I don't think anyone has pointed out Fresco, [berlin-consortium.org] which represents the "spiritual parent" of Berlin, [berlin-consortium.org] which was the "free" toolkit for X that was ignored in favor of Motif, and provided standardized interfacing via IDL (which was not yet formalized as CORBA), as well as some interesting ways of organizing output presentation.

    A common thread across all of these (perhaps save for Fresco) is that Licensing Is Really Important.

    NeWS and NeXTstep and the "Andrew thing" all had some technical merits that were overruled by licensing constraints. They were owned by major companies (Sun, NeXT, IBM), and in the scramble to maximize revenue, and, more importantly, maximize control, the notion of them having the potential to become industry-wide schemes was lost. (Microsoft took a different tack with Win32; MSFT fought long, hard, and nasty to ensure that their software would be dominant. If you can dominate, you don't need to "share" to see your system go industry-wide. Insert visions of leather-clad Bill Gates with a whip here... )

    The "N" guys had a further constraint, that being that they both had dependancies on Display Postscript, from Adobe. The only way they could become ubiquitous was for Adobe to become more ubiquitous. Some of Apple's troubles in getting "Rhapsody/MacOS-X" released relate to that in that it appears Adobe has concluded they'd rather not sell DPS.

    Fresco, in contrast, got "shafted" in the political wars between the UNIX vendors. It wasn't proprietary enough for their liking at the time, or so it would appear. I have a feeling that the UNIX world would be considerably different today if Fresco had been chosen over Motif...

  • Re:The Andrew Window Manager (Score:3)

    by Twistor ( 174197 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @07:57AM (#1075470)
    From "Graphical User Interfaces and Graphic Standards" by Jon Peddie (McGraw-Hill, 1991):

    Sketchpad

    "...Ivan Sutherland designed Sketchpad in the early 1960's for his graduate thesis."

    Xerox

    "Xerox was researching [GUI] tools at [PARC] throughout the 1970s. The historical roots of GUIs at Xerox go back to early work done in Smalltalk and the Star. Nearly all the features that are now expected on a windowing system were available on the Xerox Star... Star was the first fairly complete implementation of what is now considered a GUI... even though the Xerox Star is generally recognized as the main introduction of the GUI, Xerox's own developers cite 14 earlier computer systems that influenced their work."

    Englebark

    "The inventor of the mouse was Douglas Englebark at Xerox Parc... because of the inaccuracy of Englebark's early analog mouse, his design did not include what is known today as modeless interactivity... the schema was: move word, the click the mouse to indicate which word, then pick the object, and then do a command accept."

    RAND SYSTEM

    "One of the first systems to offer intimacy between computer and user (i.e. the threshold of charm) was the RAND system developed... in 1967. Initially done as an interface system for financial analysts who couldn't type, it employed the world's first data tablet. It had automatic sizing and object linking capabilities and character recognition. The user could draw symbolic boxes, interconnect them for their relationships, and label them (using hand printed characters), as well as erase and other logical, normal day-to-day functions.

    "This system also had automatic geometry correction so that the user could draw an approximation of a box and the computer would automatically square it up and make it look like a box. The system had the first resizable capabilities, which were the inspiration for resizable windows on the Macintosh. The RAND system is literally where the Macintosh Window control capability came from, according to Alan Kay, one of the inventors of the GUI at Xerox PARC."

    X Windows

    "The X Window system originated with James Gettys, a [DEC] researcher assigned to MIT's Project Athena, and Robert Scheifler, a reseracher with the MIT [Lab for C.S.] In the summer of 1984 both had been struggling with a need for a windowing system in their separate projects... The only window software available at the time for the VS100 was some software called W, which Paul Asente and Brian Reed had worked on at Stanford University to run under the Stanford V [OS]. So the project started with W, but after they had been working (hacking) on it for a few weeks, it clearly wasn't W anymore. They had to call it something, so they decided to use the next letter, and that is why X is called X."

    On page 32 there is a wonderful visual history of OS and GUIs which i'll try to render here (my fiefdom for a "pre" tag!):("--" == begat)

    AppleDOS--ProDos

    CP/M-80--CP/M-86--Conc-CP/M-86

    CP/M-80--(2nd branch)--DOS1.0--DOS-2--(DOS-2 then branches into 4 sub groups: DOS3.0 (ends with DOS5.0 and another branch to OS/21.0--OS/2 PM); Windows1.0 (branches into Windows2.x and Windows386 which reunite into Windows32.x(NT) but since this is from 1991 it would of course branch also into Win9.x later); GEM; Desqview

    Xerox Alto (and) Xerox Star--Apple Lisa--Apple Mac

    Multics--(in one gigantic conglomeration)--UNIX, XENIX, AIX, AUX, MACH (out of which emerges)--Open Look, --OSF/1 Motif, --NeXTstep, and --MS System v/386 3.2--MS System V/386 4.0

    There is still more historical detail on the other, later GUI systems... Windows, NewWave, NeWS, NeXTstep, etc. but my hands are a bit raw from the typing!

    Thank You and Goodnight!

  • my fun with graphics (Score:3)

    by craw ( 6958 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @07:59AM (#1075471) Homepage
    Wow, I just had a flashback. In the "old days", there were no cute widgets. If you wanted a button, you wrote code to display your own button. Or you stole your buddy's code. Back then, open source was not a buzz word, but was the only means of survival. IIRC, we used a lot of keyboard input to control things (e.g., j/k to move an object up/down).

    This doesn't necessarily cover GUI's, but it is my personal history with graphic calls. Well, to really begin, there was Calcomp plotting calls; we had no display CRT's, just paper. Then on to Tektronix plotting on the good old 4010 green screen of death. The Tek4010 was great. Just sit there in a dark room while hitting the clear/refresh button; poof, poof, poof. Apollo DomainOS with either gpr(?) or core graphics was fun. Direct memory access on a NumberNine graphics board to manipulate the pixel values. NeWS and GL on a SGI (IRIX 3.0, IIRC). Then onto SunView which was pretty easy to learn. But once I learned SunView, OpenLook came out.

    Then back to GL and the use of a new widget set called Forms written by Mark Overmars; this eventually became xforms. I think I still have the Forms source code. Then, drumroll please, X11 and, *gasp* Motif with IRIX 4.0. Did I mention steep learning curve. I'm now dabbling around with openGL and Gtk (BTW, Gtk looks pretty good).

    Never got to play with PHIGS, nor wrote code for the MacOS.

    Sorry for rambling, but I guess what I'm saying is that it was a real mess back then. Definitely roll your own. The concept of a uniform cross-platform GUI is a relatively "new" development.

  • I find that *keyboards* contribute to my problems...I can click away for hours at non-typing tasks with nary a twinge, yet if I type for more than 10 minutes, my hands go numb.

    It may be your mouse placement. Me, I have my mouse up high enough (methinks) and it's usually bare centimeters from my keyboard.

    If you try to suggest, also, that I use one of those damn IBM eraserheads to manipulate photos, you deserve to be shot. If I were to have to use one of these, I'd need to have a second pointing device. What does this mean? It means the primary pointing device sucks.

    Personally, I'll stick with my Intellimouse, thank you very much. :^P
  • Urk, I didn't realize that the GNU page I linked didn't have a download listed. :)

    ftp://ftp.uni-er langen.de/pub/utilities/screen/screen-3.9.5.tar.gz [uni-erlangen.de]

  • I'm not sure how far back the Xerox GUI's go, but it's certainly before the early 80's. I remember seeing the Apple Lisa get launched around '83, which was inspired by the Xerox work. I believe the Xerox Star was one of the first GUI workstations. Back then the paradigm was called "WIMP" (Windows, Icons, Mice, Pointers), not GUI.

    It's sad how many people don't realize that prety much ALL of "modern" computing was invented at Xerox at least 20 years ago!

    - bit mapped graphical displays
    - windows
    - mice / pointers
    - ethernet / networking

    Even something like Visual Basic is really nothing more than a poor man's version of Smalltalk to provide an object orientated graphical component architecture.

  • Look around you (Score:4)

    by FooRat ( 182725 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @08:55AM (#1075476)

    "I harldy ever use graphical environments, and don't see how it adds a huge amount to my work..."

    Try (for just a few seconds) to look outside of your own personal sphere of computing experience, which you say requires very little, if anything, in the way of a graphical environment. Consider for a moment that there may be other people who perform tasks on computers totally unrelated to your line of work, that do require a graphical environment. Like photo-editting for example (I challenge you to name any popular magazine published in the last 5 years that does not use computers to (at the very least) touch up photos). Video-editting is another. CAD and 3D Design are more examples. How about architectural design programs? Virtual Reality? Games?

    Humans naturally process information visually, so it makes sense to build tools that take advantage of that. It is far more useful for an architect, for example, to be able to see a graphical depiction of his design than a bunch of numbers in a text file. Photo editors may be able to do a lot of cool stuff with scripts - but with nothing graphical to display the results on, those scripts are useless.

    Even in programming there are many possibilities for visualizing information in a useful way that would be much harder (or impossible) to do with just a CLI. For example, a profiler can use graphs to make it easy for a programmer doing optimizations to spot the trouble-spots in his code extremely quickly. Graphical tree or graph widgets can be used to help visualize the dependencies within modules in an application - allowing a newcomer to learn the overall layout of the source code in seconds, rather than hours.

    Of course, the mere ability to display numerical data graphically is useful in almost any industry. E.g. by graphing a stock price over time you can glean information about the trends in a couple of seconds; that would take you hours to do manually by trying to stare at the numbers. Yes, you could draw a bar graph on a CLI - but you simply don't have quite the same sampling resolution. Neither do you have the ability to draw other types of graphs very well, such as pie charts. A CLI absolutely sucks when it comes to displaying mathematical formulas - or even simple superscript/subscript text for that matter.

    Games are another technology driver that scream for cool graphics. The industry of computer games (and more generally, entertainment) form a large part of the economy and create many jobs. This industry would not be possible if we all used CLI's. I'm sure that a text mode Quake3Arena would just not have quite the same feel.

    Virtual Reality applications absolutely have to have the best possible graphics. VR applications are immeasurably useful as industrial training tools that can be used to train workers to not only be more productive, but to be better equipped to handle emergency situations, and thus save lives (e.g. a coal-mining training simulator.) Can't do it with just a CLI.

    I'm sure that sound mixing and editting could potentially be done using just a CLI; but just by using some more advanced visualization methods for sound (even a simple waveform for example) helps a sound editor immeasurably in getting his/her job done quicker and easier.

    There are hundreds more potential applications for computers that have graphical environment.

    Considering that a CLI can exist as a subset of a graphical environment (eg xterms) I don't see any reason not to build computers to support *both*.

    If computers did not have graphic environments then they, as tools, would not be general-purpose enough to be very useful or popular.

    You stick to your xterms (or DOS boxes if thats your thing) if you like, but open your mind a bit. Not only sysadmins and programmers sit behind computers.

  • Display Ghostscript (Score:3)

    by DGolden ( 17848 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @08:07AM (#1075477) Homepage Journal
    Display Ghostscript [gnustep.org], a part of the GNUStep [gnustep.org] project is coming along, slowly but surely. - what I want to know is: Seeing as Ghostscript supports PDF as well as PS, will we therefore see a Libre version of the Display PDF technolgy that Quartz is based on ???
  • GEOS is (apparently) the only 8-bit GUI operating system being sold, and the only 8-bit GUI that is a success. Over 1.6 million copies of GEOS were sold by Berkeley Softworks, or came bundled with new Commodore 64s and 128s. The GEOS operating system was first sold in 1986; the last version, GEOS 2.0, was released in 1988. GEOS is very remarkable, especially considering the hardware it was written for. The GEOS deskTop is document-oriented, and allowed drag-and-drop file printing, deleting, and copying. (Windows did not offer drag-and-drop file printing until a latter date with Windows 3.1; and did not offer drag-and-drop file deleting until Windows 95! Macintosh did not offer drag-and drop printing until a latter date with System 7.5!) While the PCs being sold today have multi-megabytes of disk space and RAM, GEOS ran in 64K of RAM from a single 170K floppy disk drive! ------------------------------------------------ The above is quouted from the following sites, you can check out some screenshots there: http://www.pernet.net/~james1/cbm_geos/intro.htm http://www.zimmers.net/geos/

  • Re:why a mouse (Score:3)

    by grl ( 88305 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @08:10AM (#1075493) Homepage

    It's ironic that Doug Engelbart is most widely known as 'the inventor of the mouse', but specifically created it to be used in combination with a chord keyset so that you could (with practice) point, click with one hand, and type content or CLI commands very rapidly with the other.

    On this subject, Alan Kay said:

    Looking back I think that one of the paradoxes is that we made a complete mistake when we were doing the interface at PARC because we assumed that the kids would need an easy interface because we were going to try and teach them to program and stuff like that, but in fact they are the ones who are willing to put hours into getting really expert at things - shooting baskets, learning to hit baseballs, learning to ride bikes, and now on video games.

    I have a four-year old nephew who is really incredible and he could use NLS fantastically if it were available, he would be flying through that stuff because his whole thing is to become part of the system he's interacting with and so if I had had that perspective I would have designed a completely different interface for the kids, one in which how you became expert was much more apparent than what I did. So I'm sorry for what I did. The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium [brown.edu], Oct 1995

    See

  • Re:UIs at Xerox PARC (Score:3)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @09:54AM (#1075495) Journal
    Here's a link [mackido.com] about the PARC - Apple relationship. Like all David Every's stuff, it's worth taking with a grain of salt but is informative and offers a new perspective.

    A point I didn't see in that article is that, as I understand it, PARC didn't have overlapping windows redrawing properly. The Apple engineers didn't notice that and went back to work and developed QuickDraw -- basically reverse engineering something that didn't actually exist yet.

  • Someone should ask Rob Pike (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, 2000 @08:24AM (#1075496)
    http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/ He is credited with the first bitmapped display for a Unix system. Not really a GUI (really just a bunch of bitmapped TTY's) but the infrastructure was available to develop one.

  • AmigaOS (Score:3)

    by exa ( 27197 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @09:58AM (#1075497) Homepage Journal
    Well, the Amiga 1000 surely had a graphical interface, and way back in 85. AmigaOS "graphics.library" and other UI layers on top were pretty excellent, and almost a breeze to code with. That I felt when I first coded in xlib and xtoolkit. I was thinking how easy it was to get good looking and functional interfaces on the Amiga. Any X program would look brain dead to me. That is especially true if you're using emacs or axe as your editor :) Then, I remember the slickest editor was Cygnus Ed on the Amiga. I used assembler "IDE"s, but there were a lot of apps that rocked. Some of the best computer graphics were drawn with DPaint for sure. That was so great then! None of the Photoshop/GIMP belly aches. And I think DevPac was great. Hmm, hey who can forget DOpus? Those x86 users had the poor norton commander. That used to feel good. When they saw an Amiga desktop, they would go *gasp*. And those great DTP programs. I'm afraid there's just too many to tell...

    Not forgetting that Amiga had a bunch of very cool graphics primitives that you could play with. The design of Amiga UI's have always seemed very logical, and I think wb3.0 looked sweet. You had your gadgets, and once you put a gadget that was it. Contrast with Win32 or X-windows.

    The real story is, however, the underlying OS. When I got hold of ROM Kernel Reference Manual - Exec, I was kind of overwhelmed. It took time to understand what was going on there. The fast message passing, pre-emptive multitasking lightweight kernel, dynamic device drivers and libraries. Thanks to Carl Sassenrath! Man, you could not possibly ask for more then. And it all was packed in 512K of ROM. It sure went up to 1MB but it was worth it. If the Amiga hadn't gone down due to the stupidity of Commodore it would still stand straight in the world of multi-user OS's. And possibly POSIX compliant. Those were the days... :\

    I also remember an object oriented programming model in the recent versions of AmigaOS, what was that called?

  • UIs at Xerox PARC (Score:4)

    by Scott_Marks ( 179077 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @05:55AM (#1075500)
    And what _was_ XEROX up to when Jobs & Co. came to visit?

    When I visited PARC in the early eighties, the screens were still B/W and in portrait configuration. The Altos and 1100 series machines were mostly running Smalltalk-80 or Interlisp, both of which were pretty standard (for today) windowing systems: menu bars, pop-up right-button menus, etc. They were developing the icon interface which became the failed Lisa design, and were also programming in Mesa. Interlisp, Smalltalk and Mesa all had programming UIs similar to M$ofts Visual line.

    The company I worked for (Schlumberger) took a flying leap at the Xerox Lisp machines. For a couple of years I programmed on 1132s (the Dorado, a $130,000 personal computer!) and 1100s (Dolphin) 1108/1109s (Dandelion). We were doing oil well log analysis; my bit was doing the graphics, scrolling the logs, picking features with mouse clicks, linking to the rest of the AI system.

    So I think all this makes me feel very old ...

  • FAQ from 1996 about X (Score:4)

    by cnj ( 87028 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @05:58AM (#1075501) Homepage

    http://wwwipd.ira.uka. de/~frueauf/FAQ/NetBSD-Amiga-X-FAQ.txt [ira.uka.de] is a rather lengthy FAQ dealing with X (servers, clients, etc). It mentions X10 as being the first X system.

    Subject: 11) Just what is X11? This question is hard to answer. X11 is the successor of X10.

    Ah, you guessed that? :-)
    Maybe we should ask another question: What is X at all ?
    The X windowing system is a retargetable graphics systems for almost every computer platform.
    X was developed at the MIT labs, Massachuset, and many other companies: The X-consortium. X is copyrighted by them. MIT started X some years ago, X10 was the first X windows system, which had success on a wide range of computers, X11 had some significant changes in the protocoll and started with the Release Version 1 (R1). R4 and R5 are still in use, but R6 is the most recent release (1994).

    "And what the people but a herd confus'd,
    A miscellaneous rabble, who extol

  • why a mouse (Score:4)

    by geekpress ( 171549 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:01AM (#1075502) Homepage
    What I want to know is: Why a mouse? It is the most absurd piece of equipment ever invented. Why?

    Until recently, it was always off to the side of the keyboard, requiring a user to take their hand off the keyboard in order to move the pointer. Most mice are still constructed in this fashion -- and people have no idea how much time they waste moving their hand between the keyboard and the mouse!

    It provides the joys of carpal tunnel (at least for me) in a way that a keyboard never will.

    I always liked IBM's trackpoint eraser mouse in the middle of the keyboard. You can type and mouse at the same time and I have no carpal tunnel problems with it, as my hands stay in the same place whether I'm typing or mousing. However, the movement was too sluggish and so I was damaging my pointer finger by using it.

    Any have any good ideas for pointing devices built into a keyboard? It's pretty pathetic that we're still using the same equiptment to access our GUIs after all these years.

    -- Diana Hsieh

  • The Andrew Window Manager (Score:5)

    by osu-neko ( 2604 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:04AM (#1075504)

    What follows is an excerpt from "Programming as if People Mattered: Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions", by Nathaniel S. Borenstein.

    The Andrew Window Manager

    An interesting constrast to the UNIX success story is the less well known but far more typical tale of how the institutionalized greed of the men in suits managed to kill another promising piece of software, the Andrew Window Manager. In contrast to the UNIX story, which occupies a key role in the history of computer software, the Andrew Window Manager is nothing more than a footnote in that history, a minor story that has been quietly repeated many times without anyone ever seeming to learn anything from it.

    The Andrew Window Manager (WM) is a program that, as its name implies, manages windows on a computer's screen. It was one of the first network-oriented window managers to run under the UNIX operating system on a scientific workstation with a bitmap display. It was fast, easy to use, and reasonably reliable. Among those who used this class of machine, it generated intense interest, and a steady stream of visitors came to its birthplace, Carnegie Melon University (CMU), to see it.

    However, WM was not owned by CMU. It was developed as part of the Andrew Project, a joint venture of IBM and CMU. Part of the agreement that defined the joint venture stated that IBM would own the software, but that "reasonable" licensing arrangements would be available.

    Unfortunately, there are many definitions of "reasonable." To a university, a licensing arrangement like the standard UNIX license was "reasonable." To IBM, such low-cost licensing sounded insane. While IBM and CMU argued over licensing arrangements, the people waiting for licenses got impatient.

    One such group, from MIT, eventually gave up on WM entirely, and built their own window system instead. That system, which they called X Windows, has the traditional evolutionary relationship with its predecessor: it did everything WM could do, and more. Moreover, the MIT group managed to align itself with a multivendor consortium that funded the continued development of X Windows as a nonproprietary, easily licensed standard window system. Within a few years, IBM found that nobody even wanted to license WM any more, and that IBM was in danger of being entirely left out of an emerging standard. With little choice, IBM embraced the X Windows standard, and CMU began converting all of the Andrew application software from WM to X.

    What is most notable here is that WM was a very promising and useful piece of software. It was ahead of its time, and many groups would have liked to pick it up, use it, and improve it. By trying to from the beginning to squeeze every possible penny out of it, IBM squeezed the life out of it instead. Good software needs to evolve, and it cannot evolve in the face of greedy licensing arrangements.


    --

  • original interface (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:05AM (#1075506)
    I have a Smith & Wesson, which is the original point and click interface. The results are also quite graphical when the system is loaded.
  • Why a mouse?

    When the Alto (the first personal computer) was invented at Xerox PARC (around 1974, I think) they tested lots of "pointing" devices with users. The programmers were favoring a "chord" device which had five electric organ keys, so that you could "chord" any of 31 different combinations. Imagine trying to convince users to memorize those!

    The winners in the ease-of-use-with-real-users competition were the mouse and the trackball, with the mouse just slightly favored. You see the results of those tests today, where scratch-and-sniff pads, which work like flat trackballs, are common on laptops.

    Those same programmers took over the Lisp Machine world in the eighties, which is why the Symbolics Lips machine had Shift-, Ctrl-, Meta- and Hyper- keys. I recall that at MIT Meta-Hyper-E (some combination involving E, anyway) would call the very slow elevator up to the AI Lab floor. Considerably more useful than a Web client in your refrigerator, IMO.

  • Actually, if you want a good text-based windowing system, use screen [gnu.org].

    It sets up several different virtual "VT100s" that are easily switched between with a key combination (^A+X, where X is a letter cooresponding to a certain command you wish to use. C is spawn new window, N is switch between, K is kill window, D is detach from VT) and also lets you detach from it and logout, leaving whatever you had running easily accessible.

    That right there is a nice feature because you don't have to drop everything into background mode. You could leave a tail -f /var/log/messages open in one window, and have apache pumping status info into another one, and have three or four epic's running in their own windows, even from a telnet or ssh connection.

    And it will run under X, even though most people wouldn't do that. :)

  • > I just hope Apple keeps the networked aspect of
    > the rendering system or makes it easy to
    > extend to do networking.

    They have removed the networking aspect, while I believe they've stated that the option will exist for a third party to implement this functionality, as usually is the line Apple states after removing some functionality from their new OS.

    If Mac OS X ever comes to Intel, I know would be interested in working on it again, particularly in the area of networked graphics, as well as many other areas which are of no interest to me because of the limited deployment platforms of this OS.

    TmT

  • Sgi started with a GL (the thing that came before OpenGL for those of you too young to remember) based windowing environment called Mex. I don't have any idea what it stood for, but it was in existence around 1987 on their 3130 series of workstations. About that time Sun had their Postscript based NeWS (NEtwok Windowing System) out and Sgi later switched to this model. I can't remember the exact date, but I think they switched around 1988. NeWS was starting to see some acceptance in the minsupercpmputer market as Alliant Computer Systems used it in a distributed model to talk to sun workstations and later as the basis for their Raster technolgies based graphics subsytem. Competing windows systems from Apollo, Intergraph, and DEC (as seen on the microVax workstations) also existed, but remained proprietary and not network transparent as X and NeWS were. Sgi's NeWS server also incorporated an X11 interpretter which allowed it to accept X11 connections, although the performance was less than stellar. Around 1991, Sgi switched entirely to X11 and added dgl (distributed GL) to the mix allowing GL to run over the network in a similar way that X11 did. The dates are best guesses for memory, so I may be off a bit.

  • Emacs! (Score:4)

    by Uruk ( 4907 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:07AM (#1075525)
    Along with emacs identity as a web browser, and email client, an editor, an ftp client, and even an irc client, emacs is a windowing system.

    Try firing up emacs and hitting C-x 2 if you don't believe me.

    Oh sure, maybe it doesn't following the WIMP paradigm per se, and maybe it's only just text, but conniseurs of lynx know the value of text. It's better than eye-clogging graphics of indescribable shapes and colors that prove nothing other than that the author had WAY too much time.

    Emacs is the ultimate windowing system. I haven't gotten around to write a window manager in elisp yet, but I'm sure there's somebody out there that would do it. :)

  • sorry, here are some additional links I had intended to included above (anyone else getting a lot of 500 errors today?)

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /06/19/1438200.shtml [slashdot.org]
    http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retroco mputing/ (just some cool old stuff, not really about X) [brouhaha.com]
    as usual, the /. artricle has some good info

    "And what the people but a herd confus'd,
    A miscellaneous rabble, who extol

  • As usual, there is a middle ground, a place where GUI-decadents and CLI-saurians meet. Many, many people run (many) shell "terminal" windows at once. There is a place and time and application for both worlds. Just like the best music (IMHO) is made from combining the electronic and the acoustic, the best working environment for me has the best of both GUI and CLI. So let's cut out the old X/Y warz (Gods, I'm so tired of those) and do some *on*-topic things.
  • This is the article: Fifteen Years of X [slashdot.org]
    An anonymous reader wrote in to say that X was originally announced at MIT fifteen years ago today. The original announcement is attached below if you're curious. If they knew where it would be today!

  • What was NeWS (Score:5)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:16AM (#1075529) Homepage
    i know nothing about NeWS, but have been very curious about it ever since i first heard of it.

    I first heard of it in the X chapter of the UNIX haters handbook [catalog.com], which makes occational references to NeWS as a windowing system done right. It's also a very interesting read (not FUD at all, just reasonable if incendentary analysis..) and probably would tell you a little about NeWS..

    The URL i just listed above, btw, which i just found now on Google, happens to contain a link to a series of NeWS resources [catalog.com], which i haven't read yet. draw your own conclusions.

    I am very curious about NeWS, and if anyone out there has used it, please post and let us know anything about it you may have to say.. Or is there anyone who STILL uses it?

    What are the differences between this, DPS, and Quartz? DPS and Quartz aren't capable of running over a network are they? (i fear this last sentance will ignite an irrelivant flamewar, but i'm curious, so i'll include it anyway..)

  • Re:X Origins (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, 2000 @11:25AM (#1075535)
    I'm Dave Rosenthal. I worked on window systems for a long time. I was one of
    the authors of the Andrew window system, and NeWS. I did the first port of
    the X Window System to non-DEC hardware and was one of the team that got X11
    release 1 out the door.

    This comment has good references, all worth reading. The Methodology of Window
    Management book is the record of a workshop in 4/85 - it has a lot of pointers
    to work further back, in particular a paper called "Ten Years of Window
    Systems" by Warren Teitelman, who was at PARC and then ran the Windows group
    at Sun. This describes many of the early window systems at PARC.

    I'm not going to try to write a complete history, but I do want to correct
    several misleading statements in the comments to this post. There were
    several streams of development which naturally influenced each other- broadly:

    - Libraries supporting multiple windows from one or more threads in
    a single address space, starting from Smalltalk leading to the Mac
    and Windows environments.
    - Kernel window systems supporting access to multiple windows from
    multiple address spaces on a single machine, starting with the Blit
    and leading to SunWindows and a system for the Whitechapel MG-1.
    - Network window systems supporting access to multiple windows from
    multiple address spaces on multiple machines via a network, starting
    from work at PARC by Bob Sproull & (if memory serves) Elaine
    Sonderegger, leading to Andrew, SunDew which became NeWS, and W
    which became X.

    Gosling & I & others at C-MU's Information Technology Center wrote the Andrew
    window system. We were all post-docs by then, not students. My memory
    is that it was working OK in the spring of '84.

    NeWS was not based on Display Postscript. Gosling built a completely
    independent (and much faster) implementation of PostScript from the
    specification that Adobe published as a book. This was SunDew. It was
    never a fully functional window system. NeWS was a ground-up re-write
    of SunDew, adding extensive multi-threading and garbage collection to
    the PostScript clone. My memory is that it was working pretty well by
    the summer of '86.

    Early versions of X were specific to bizarre DEC hardware. While I was
    working on NeWS at Sun I also did the first port of X10 to non-DEC
    hardware - to Sun 1,2 & 3 workstations. Experience from this and later
    ports of X10 was a major input to the redesign that resulted in X11,
    and this careful design has led to reasonably easy porting to X11 to a
    wide range of hardware.

    I'm not going to comment on the politics which have surrounded window
    systems, except to say that an individual's rankings of the importance
    of different technical, aesthetic or licensing features are no more than
    an individual's views. The market's view of the same features can be
    quite different without the operation of conspiracies or malign forces.
    It may simply be that the majority of customers don't agree with your
    priorities.
  • Maybe they can still redeem themselves for one of the biggest sins in computer science history. The code is dated but it still exists. Perhaps they can release it for free today?

    I just sent Email to James Gosling about this, actually. I don't know if he'll respond, or what he'll think of the idea, but if he wants to see it released, I'm betting he has enough influence within Sun to make it happen. I would love to see the original NeWS code (not just the X11/NeWS merged server) released under a true Open Source license (not SCSL!); NeWS was a really nice system, and I think it still has a place in today's world, but not as a proprietary product.

    Back in 1987 when I used NeWS as my primary windowing system (on a diskless Sun 3/50 running SunOS 3.x), I could see how much of a lead X11R3 was already taking over NeWS, despite the obvious superiority of NeWS. It was obvious to me at the time that Sun could beat X11 in the marketplace if they would just release the source. Sadly, Sun continued to live in a world of wishful thinking, believing that they could beat open standards with closed standards entirely under their exclusive control, even when it became obvious that this was a failing strategy. Sun still lives in that dream world today, as evidenced by their SCSL license. Sun doesn't seem to learn well from experience.

    But, as you say, Sun could finally redeem themselves for the NeWS fiasco by finally releasing that code, dated though it may be. NeWS will never succeed as a proprietary product; that has been blatently obvious for over a decade. It could succeed as an Open Source project, if Sun can stand to relinquish control for once. They don't have much to lose; NeWS is already a dead product, and represents no value at all for them in its current proprietary state...

    Maybe we need a petition to free NeWS at last?
  • Java is essentially NeWS "the next generation". Java has the same display-side programmability, stack architecture, and PostScript imaging model.

    Where Java improves over NeWS is that the language part of it is actually pretty usable and mainstream, that its multithreading works a lot better, and that it manages to isolate code from each other much better. Java also, so far, has been delivered to run on top of existing window systems, but Java can run standalone.

    You can already use Java as a display server for Java itself using RMI (IBM has put together a package; see alphaworks.ibm.com). And, of course, it's used as a GUI server for many web applications.

    What is really missing is a set of C/C++/OC widgets that work analogously to the NeWS or NeXTStep widgets. I sense a good open source project here :-)

  • X, W, and ttys (Score:4)

    by Seth Finkelstein ( 90154 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:20AM (#1075546) Homepage Journal
    See the history articles at http://www.enteract.com/~enf/afc/tty [enteract.com]
    (scroll down, the X articles are toward the bottom)

  • Re:why a mouse (Score:5)

    by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Saturday May 13, 2000 @06:21AM (#1075548) Journal
    Apple and others have done studies showing that on average, mouse users are no less efficient than pure keyboard users, despite the hand moving. The reason is that the user spends more time finding the correct command than actually executing the command. (Note that this is a generalization -- if you know the emacs or MS Word keyboard commands by heart, you are going to be faster than a mouse user. However, if you don't, you will probably be slower.) The general rule is that your brain is slower than your hands.

    Anyway, I've been using a mouse for about 14 years, and have never had any carpel tunnel problems, from the mouse. A typical crapo PC keyboard will have my fingers knotted in 5 minutes, however. So, I normally run with an IBM Trackpoint II keyboard plus a MS optical mouse just because the trackpoint 'seems' quicker (not necessarily easier), and typing is definately quicker on the clickity-clack. I do wish there was a scroll wheel on this old IBM keyboard, though.
    --

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