<story><title>Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (2018)</title><url>https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>russellbeattie</author><text>I had to look up NeWS because I was bewildered at how Sun was writing PostScript by hand to create a whole GUI. Wikipedia has a nice summary comparing it to Display PostScript used in the NeXT:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sun Microsystems took another approach, creating NeWS. Instead of DPS&amp;#x27;s concept of allowing PS to interact with C programs, NeWS instead extended PS into a language suitable for running the entire GUI of a computer. Sun added a number of new commands for timers, mouse control, interrupts and other systems needed for interactivity, and added data structures and language elements to allow it to be completely object oriented internally. A complete GUI, three in fact, were written in NeWS and provided for a time on their workstations. However, the ongoing efforts to standardize the X11 system led to its introduction and widespread use on Sun systems, and NeWS never became widely used.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I miss Sun. They were fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mapgrep</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve read a couple of books about Sun (maybe I should say, &amp;quot;both books about Sun&amp;quot;) and my memory is that NeWS was considered significantly more elegant than X11 by many people who understood the problem space, and Sun was set on trying to make it an open standard as they did for NFS.&lt;p&gt;However, Sun (and again this is just my memory) had left many in the industry feeling burned on its last big standards push, I believe this was around NFS, and I don&amp;#x27;t recall the details of why. But there was so much bad blood that NeWS had an uphill battle. And I recall clearly (from these books) that there was a conscious effort when Java came along to help it avoid the fate of NeWS. Also as Wikipedia notes the actual Sun implementation of NeWS carried a licensing fee; mind you, they had a fairly open posture toward licensing the source but they did charge, whereas MIT gave away X11 code.&lt;p&gt;Anyway maybe someone can tell me how wrong I am here!</text></comment>
<story><title>Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (2018)</title><url>https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>russellbeattie</author><text>I had to look up NeWS because I was bewildered at how Sun was writing PostScript by hand to create a whole GUI. Wikipedia has a nice summary comparing it to Display PostScript used in the NeXT:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sun Microsystems took another approach, creating NeWS. Instead of DPS&amp;#x27;s concept of allowing PS to interact with C programs, NeWS instead extended PS into a language suitable for running the entire GUI of a computer. Sun added a number of new commands for timers, mouse control, interrupts and other systems needed for interactivity, and added data structures and language elements to allow it to be completely object oriented internally. A complete GUI, three in fact, were written in NeWS and provided for a time on their workstations. However, the ongoing efforts to standardize the X11 system led to its introduction and widespread use on Sun systems, and NeWS never became widely used.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I miss Sun. They were fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arethuza</author><text>I would argue that the best NeWS interface toolkit wasn&amp;#x27;t even built by Sun - HyperNeWS|HyperLook:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=20182294&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=20182294&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Writing PostScript by hand was actually rather good fun - it&amp;#x27;s actually quite a nice language.</text></comment>