[SunRescue] Low-Bandwidth X

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, William Staniewicz wrote:

> Today on Slashdot there is a discussion of "Low-Bandwidth X".
> One of the people posting suggested that Sun's original NeWS and
> DPS solved this problem. He further claims that Display
> Postscript is more bandwidth efficient than plain X.

For certain types of data which can be rendered on the client side this is
very true.  For other data it's a bit of a wash.

Display Postscript is still included in the Openwin X server.  I suspect
that many more applications would use it if there were widespread free
implementations with source.

> A quick search at sun.com shows NeWS being offered in
> Solaris 1 but replaced in Solaris 2 (If I am reading this correctly).

NeWS was dropped after Solaris 2.3.

NeWS largely died due to the efforts of HP, DEC and IBM.  After Sun had
several stunning successes in the Unix world in the form of de facto
standards (NFS and YP were the biggest) the "big three" decided that they
weren't about to let Sun change the rules in Unix GUI's.  If they had
licensed NeWS or reimplemented it we might have a very different world.

In my opinion, NeWS (the technology) has a number of superiorities to X.
The NeWS _servers_ distributed by Sun weren't always up to scratch,
though.

A modern reimplementation would be very interesting to see.

-James