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X and NeWS history

(minnie.tuhs.org)
177 points colinprince | 2 comments | 24 Sep 17 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source
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grabcocque ◴[24 Sep 17 16:39 UTC] No.15325399[source]▶
I doubt it will come as a surprise to anyone that X was fundamentally ill conceived from the very beginning. It’s one of those unfortunate side effects of unintended consequences that Unix history saddled us with it for twenty years longer than we’d ideally have wanted.

It fascinates me that something so widely regarded as Bad and Wrong, proved so hard to replace when it’s baked into a system. I think there’s a cautionary tale about the necessity of getting your core APIs right, because you might never be able to get rid of them.

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pjmlp ◴[24 Sep 17 16:46 UTC] No.15325431[source]▶
Having used a multitude of OSes since the 80's and having digital archeology as one of my hobbies, I think it applies to everything in UNIX's design.
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MycroftJones ◴[24 Sep 17 20:43 UTC] No.15326408[source]▶
I would like to hear more. The Unix core API is pretty simple and durable; what was better than it? Other than Plan9? SmallTalk doesn't really count.
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1. pjmlp ◴[24 Sep 17 22:35 UTC] No.15326855[source]▶
For starters having been written in C, after the Assembly and B rewrites, when we already had safer systems programming languages in the early 60's.

IBM for example did most of their RISC research with an OS written in PL/8, where they prototyped many ideas about modular compilers, a few of them visible in how LLVM works.

Then by being a plain CLI based OS versus what was being done at Xerox PARC with Xerox Star and Pilot (done in Mesa).

NeXTSTep was probably the only variant that got close of the Mac, Amiga and Atari multimedia capabilities, and even it wasn't a pure UNIX, rather used it as a means to bring applications into the NeXT world.

Many mainframe ideas about OS security are still not part of any UNIX clone, as another example.

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2. MycroftJones ◴[25 Sep 17 04:20 UTC] No.15328047[source]▶
Thank you for explaining. I disagree, but then, I started with the Commodore 64 and BASIC, and have missed them ever since. C and LISP version 1 sort of fit in the same space. I hate any language that hides the machine from me. Also don't really like clicky gooey stuff. Text and typing is where it is at. Matter of taste really. But newLISP is a good mix of hardware access with safety.