DAN@MIT-MC.ARPA (Dan Blumenfeld) (12/09/85)
I've been working with both Apollo and Sun workstations, and one of the greatest differences between them is their windowing system. Apollo's windowing system is, in my opinion, far more advanced than SunWindows, and a lot easier to work with. The key issue here is that Apollo's windowing is highly integrated into the entire "software architecture" of the machine, allowing such useful features as transcripting and cut/paste operations between windows. SunWindows is pretty minimal by comparison. Windows are simply terminal emulators, i.e. no transcripting, etc. In fact, the windows don't behave as one would expect. For example, imagine having a shell running in a window, filled with text. You shrink the window, to take up less room on the screen, then expand the window again to it's original size. The obscured text reappears, right? WRONG! What you're left with is a window with a small block of text; the rest of the window's contents is gone. Come on guys, even windowing packages for the IBM-PC work better than that! It also seems to be much easier to develop graphics software on Apollos. For one thing, the windowing system is completely transparent to the applications program per se; there is nothing special that you have to put into your code to take care of running in a windowed environment. This is quite the opposite on Sun, as there's a good bit of code involved to make sure your applications behaves properly under SunWindows. Because SunWindows runs on top of UNIX as an application, it is also much easier to perturbe, with somewhat chaotic effects on the display. Unless you really try hard, this just doesn't happen on the Apollos; the worst that ever happens to me is that a window gets messed up, and I simply kill it. Personally, I think that Sun has a lot of work to do on their windowing system, though it doesn't seem like anyone out there is doing it! Maybe they should buy some Apollos to see how to do it right. Dan Blumenfeld University of Pennsylvania [dan@mc, blumen@wharton]
Lepreau@UTAH-20.ARPA (Jay Lepreau) (12/10/85)
Some time ago Sun recognized that their window system was a loser (from the programmer's point of view, at least: incredibly complicated) and hired James Gosling to do another one. Since others discovered this long ago, there are at least three fairly well known alternatives to Sun's window system, and two are essentailly freely available (Andrew from CMU/ITC to Universities only, and X from Project Athena to anyone. Both are portable.). (Gee, everything about Apollo sounds so great but the price of the stock :-) -------