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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: 0.001s | source
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DonHopkins ◴[24 Sep 17 23:56 UTC] No.15327156[source]▶
John Steinhart is outstanding in his field!

Sometimes he's even out driving a tractor in his field! ;)

replies(1): >>15327174 #
MycroftJones ◴[25 Sep 17 00:01 UTC] No.15327174[source]▶
In that thread, it mentiond that NeWS had "problems". Can you tell us what those problems were?
replies(2): >>15327339 #>>15327479 #
1. microtherion ◴[25 Sep 17 01:29 UTC] No.15327479[source]▶
IIRC, it was much slower than other window systems running on the same machine.
replies(1): >>15327534 #
2. DonHopkins ◴[25 Sep 17 01:43 UTC] No.15327534[source]▶
With X11/NeWS, you were running two window systems at the same time on one machine, right out of the box!

Even with NeWS 1.1, you were still running parts of SunView underneath.

One cool thing that X11/NeWS could do was that X11 clients could transparently use scalable PostScript fonts, including the nice hinted "Folio" fonts, and even "user defined fonts" written in PostScript like the Hershey and Dijkstra fonts. The X11 server could call back into the NeWS PostScript interpreter to render the font at any point size!