[rescue] Speaking of Solaris GUI options...

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

GNOME 2.0 listed on Sun's web site today...

... and I am just fscking boggling at the requirements:  128MB of memory 
(256MB recommended!) and 600MB of disk space.

I'm sure that many Rescuers running older machines can see the absurdity,
but to put this in perspective:  One of my favorite windowing systems is
Sapphire[1], which ran atop Accent on the Perq.  You could run the native
Accent environment, a Common Lisp environment (that would dynamically page
in microcode to support its own instruction set!) AND a Unix-compatible
environment (Qnix, a SysV-inspired port, or a thing from CMU called
Spoonix that was BSD-flavored) and they'd all share the Sapphire window
manager driving a 100dpi 1280x1024 monochrome display.

The machine had 1 megaword (2MB) of physical memory and a 40MB hard drive.

Someone explain to me how in 20 years we've managed to increase the
processing and storage requirements by orders of magnitude, while somehow
not managing to move much beyond the basic overlapping
windows/mouse/keyboard paradigm?  Where is all this code bloat coming
from?

Sapphire had some very cool features - icons for each active window on the
screen were gathered in a separate "icons window" (rather Dock-like) that
you could minimize if you didn't want to see them.  Each process could
display a keyboard symbol (waiting for input), an alert symbol, two status
bars (showing sequential progress, or a more random display to indicate
that processing was occurring but not estimate for completion was
available) as well as a program-defined picture or title the programmer
wanted (like the typical mailbox display with the little flag indicating
when new mail had arrived).  Because Accent was the forerunner of Mach,
all the IPC plumbing was there to share devices across the network, and
run programs remotely and display them on your screen.

And it was written in Pascal, with interfaces (generated by MatchMaker -
which lives on as "Mig" in Mach) for Lisp, FORTRAN and C as well. :-)

Did I mention:  The machine had 1-2MB of memory, 40MB disk.  Total.

A few months back I tried to build Mozilla from scratch on Solaris.  Gave
up.  Too huge and bloated, too many dependencies.  For as much as I love
Unix, the chapter on X Windows in the "Unix Hater's Handbook" cracks me
up...

-- Chris

[1] Yes, it's an acroynm:  Screen Allocation Package Providing Helpful
Icons in Rectangular Environments.  Brad Meyers is bloody brilliant. :-)