[rescue] NeWS (was: FS/FTGH: Sun kit)

[der Mouse]

> How is it that the X Consortium, with so many huge companies and
> countless thousands of paid and volunteer programmers out there
> banging away on X, still haven't produced a system that was as
> seamless as a dead OS like NeXTSTEP?

Well, it's a guess, but I'd guess that it was *because* there were many
companies and countless thousands of coders, with - and this is the
really important part - no overarching authority to enforce uniformity.
All the examples of "seamless" interfaces you've mention have come from
organizations which *do* have central authorities with the power and
desire to dictate, for example, a single look-&-feel style.

> But look at the resources required - CPU, memory, and disk space - to
> support any "modern" Unix+X compared to the fully-functional NeXT
> Color Turbo - a 33Mhz box with a 400MB disk... what has happened to
> software engineering in the last 10 years?

Don't forget that that NeXT is more than just the 33MHz 68k it appears
to be.  It's got a blitter chip in there too, I understand, which
greatly improves the snappiness of display operations.  (If they'd just
documented the bloody thing...grrr.)  There's also a DSP, but that
doesn't have much to do with the interface - the visual aspects of it,
at least.

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