hopkins@poit.Eng.Sun.COM (Don Hopkins) (06/27/90)
I've just started working full time at Sun in the NeWS toolkit group! (In case you thought I was going to accept an internship at PARC this the summer, you can read my posting to alt.drugs.) Since the recent rash of "NeWS is dead" messages, I and several other people have been convinced enough to bet our careers that Sun has completely changed its attitude towards NeWS, and is now totally committed to investing the resources to develop NeWS into its full potential, and doing what has to be done to make it succeed. It's always been darkest before the dawn (puns intentionally avoided). I was pretty depressed a while there myself, but a lot has changed! There have been some *significant* changes to tNt (the NeWS toolkit, aka NDE) and the underlying substratum to make it much smaller and faster, and a lot of work is going into improving the PostScript interpreter. But what's even more important is that there is a real commitment to developing tools and applications for the NeWS toolkit. Since I've started here, I've read the new tNt documentation, and I am very impressed! I've attended a couple of design review sessions, and I am very impressed by the thought and attention everyone puts into speed, size, consistent naming, and learnability for both application writers and subclassers! Then I read the code, and I am very very impressed at how well factored it is, that you can get so much out of so little code! And after all that, I was not surprised but certainly very impressed at how fast it runs! It's not ready yet, but it's *definitily* going to happen, and it'll be *great* when it does! And it will keep getting better, because it's designed to take advantage of the future! -Don
uh311ae@LRZSUN4_7.lrz.de (07/04/90)
Hearing talk about a 'You see here a NeWS corpse' and such makes me think ... It may sound crazy to give NeWS away for free, but if someone takes a look at the big software standards today, you see something like NFS, X, TCP/IP or UNIX, all of which are (or were) freely available. If good stuff is on the net, everyone will use it, improve it or fix bugs (Hello 1.1) - which is very useful ! It would be a real biggie to swap X and NeWS, wouldn't it ? At least I haven't seen a MiCS on X so far, and I guess they have a long way to go for it (XR20). Sun makes its money from hardware, anyway. Henrik Klagges (Postscript fonts are cracked by now, I hear 8)
uh311ae@sun7.lrz-muenchen.de (Henrik Klagges) (11/09/90)
Hello, let me start with a quotation (4th of July,90): :) From: uh311ae@sun7.lrz-muenchen.de (Henrik Klagges) :) Keywords: Make NeWS free software ! :) :) Hearing talk about a 'You see here a NeWS corpse' and such makes me :) think ... :) It may sound crazy to give NeWS away for free, but if someone :) takes a look at the big software standards today, you see something :) like NFS, X, TCP/IP or UNIX, all of which are (or were) freely :) available. If good stuff is on the net, everyone will use it, improve :) it or fix bugs (Hello 1.1) - which is very useful ! :) It would be a real biggie to swap X and NeWS, wouldn't it ? At least :) I haven't seen a MiCS on X so far, and I guess they have a long way :) to go for it (XR20). Oh man - almost there ! Just to give it the final touch: Free source code for the universities is excellent, but this gets going only when the source, all the bug fixes, new class hierarchies (Kill lite !) etc. are accessible via at least semi- anonymous ftp, like the Brown University software. It is, however, sad to work on a Silicon Graphics 4D210GTX and always hear about 'NeWS being discontinued by SGI in the next major release'. Sigh. Yours, Henrik Klagges STM Group uh311ae@sun7.lrz-muenchen.de