[SunRescue] Low-Bandwidth X

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 12:25:24PM -0500, 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.

Yes, he is right, in certain cases.

DPS is a vector format, not a bitmap one.  Thus, text is represented
as formatting commands plus the actual text, and lines and circles can
be represented rather compactly.  However, DPS is more verbose when it
has to actually handle bitmaps, such as JPEGs, GIFs, etc.  However, it
requires a lot of floating point calculations to render quickly.

NeWS was the "network extensible windowing system" - it only
downloaded the part of the windowing stuff that was needed.

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

I am not sure what version dropped NeWS from the X server, but DPS is
still there, I think.

> What do you think? Is this an example of an old idea
> addressing a contemporary situation? I guess I am curious
> since I am somewhat of a retro type person who appreciates
> things like lynx, mwm, etc.

Interesting aside:  
designer of gosling emacs = James Gosling
designer of NeWS = James Gosling
designer of Java = James Gosling

all three programs use bytecodes inside a virtual machine.  See any
design similarities?

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net