[HN Gopher] Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2...
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Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)
Author : hualapais
Score : 19 points
Date : 2025-07-21 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _In 1986 the successor to SunView was developed, the Network
| extensible Window System, or NeWS._
|
| SunView with NeWS was a powerful 2D graphics engine. It ran Adobe
| Display PostScript. The Sun workstations ran BSD unix, had good
| networking, protected memory, virtual memory and so on. And it
| did all that with 16 MB of memory. That's not a typo... 16
| megabytes. Today our computers have 1000 times more RAM, but do
| our computers work better? Hardly. The NCD terminals from 1990
| worked just as well as Chromebooks today. What have we
| accomplished in the last 35 years? Computers back then weren't
| powerful enough to play movies. Other than that I can't think of
| much I would miss if I had to go back to the old NCDs.
| anthk wrote:
| The Chapter on compiling Emacs from the Unix Haters' Handbook
| says otherwise... and I am an OpenBSD user.
|
| Somehow, in the 90's, the reverse with libre software happened:
| Rxvt, xvt, fvwm... were far lighter and featureful than plain
| TWM, XTerm's and whatnot.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah the thing is, while these things were "lightweight" in
| comparison to today, they were not lightweight relative to
| the machines of the time. I had an 8MB 486 running early
| Linux versions and it was always a struggle. You could, with
| some swapping, run emacs, mosaic, X, etc. all at once, but it
| was slow.
|
| As now, same back then .. software developers tended to max
| out the capabilities of their machines. Which we were often
| on the whole beefier than what the general community had.
|
| If you actually go back and use software from the 90s on 90s
| machines, it's amazing how slow the experience can be. Input
| latencies are often better, but .. throughput awful. Start up
| times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading... which
| we just accepted along with the sound of a grinding hard
| drive or floppy disk.
| bitwize wrote:
| Thankfully, NeWS has a successor: the browser and Electron.
| Before you giggle, recognize that in 1990 16 MiB was a HUGE
| amount of memory, and apps that needed that much to run felt
| even slower and more bloated than today's Electron apps. A
| workstation with that much memory would have cost $10,000 or so
| in 1980s dollars.
|
| Can't wait for DonHopkins to magically appear and infodump
| about NeWS and his involvement therewith, copypasta-ing entire
| email threads and even a PostScript pie menu implementation.
| anthk wrote:
| Yes... and no.
|
| By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to XT
| such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a lot.
| Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.
|
| If any, by 2025 Gnome would kill any GJS usage to parts of
| Mutter would be reimplemented in either Vala or Rust getting
| a big performance boost. BcacheFS would be a stable thing
| making EXT4 something to be legacied in years. Even the open
| release of JFS was incredible; a journaling FS being much
| better for old CPU's than EXT3...
|
| Today we are seeing the opposite trend.
| bitwize wrote:
| > By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to
| XT such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a
| lot. Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.
|
| For X11, sure (but even then there were systems that ran
| circles around X11 in half a meg of RAM).
|
| But not for NeWS.
| buescher wrote:
| I have a vague recollection of setting up mgr on Linux back in
| the nineties and giving it a spin. Maybe it was bundled with
| Slackware? That was the era that Slackware came with the Andrew
| user interface system and apps as well as xview.
| anthk wrote:
| I never got Andrew's software working. If anyone ported them to
| modern systems (and made them XFT aware) they could be more
| known. If the current Nedit with OpenMotif compoled against XFT
| supports Unicode really well, why not?...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It was around, yeah. It was also ported to the Atari ST and I
| knew people who ran it on there before I ever saw it on Unix.
|
| It's an interesting model, a path not taken.
| skissane wrote:
| I remember installing MGR (or at least trying to), but I
| couldn't really work it out. I was only a teenager, probably my
| early teens.
|
| I remember exactly where I got it from - InfoMagic's 1994 Linux
| Annual 4 volume CD-ROM set. Although that did contain
| Slackware, I'm not sure if it actually was a Slackware package.
| The CD-ROM set included dumps of Sunsite and TSX-11, and I
| think maybe it was from one of those.
|
| This CD-ROM set went through a few different editions, and
| Internet Archive has some of them, but not sure if it has the
| exact one I had - which I still have somewhere, I should
| probably try imaging it (assuming it is still readable decades
| later)
| anthk wrote:
| I knew that from some Spaniard who tried tons of WM's as a
| hobbyist, but he is competent enough to do some trivial patches
| to get them working in modern systems:
|
| https://galeriawm.hol.es
|
| In Spanish, but the screenshots speak for themselves.
| anthk wrote:
| BTW, for fun, with XGopher, Gopher or Mosaic, head to
| gopher://hngopher.com
|
| Also, if you want a 'modern' Motif desktop mimicking the
| mid-90's, install emwm, xfile, classic-colors, xpdf (the old
| Motif) one, XImaginag and Nedit for XFT.
|
| https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
|
| For a 'browser' you can use BFG, it runs gopher/gemini and
| gopher://magical.fish, gemini://gemi.dev and
| gopher://hnhgopher.com will look fine:
|
| https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG
|
| For IRC and Usenet, just use any terminal IRC client against
| libera.chat (it will look the exact same under XTerm) and... SLRN
| against the servers from https://eternal-september.org
|
| And, as for Emacs, just install/build Lucid Emacs, get a nice
| Unicode font such as Go for sans as monospaced variants, it will
| look 100% close to Lucida fonts.
|
| At ~/.Xdefaults:
|
| emacs.pane.menubar.font: Go-9 emacs.font: Go-9 emacs.fontSet:
| Go-9
|
| At ~/.emacs: (set-face-attribute 'default nil
| :family "Terminus" :height 100) ;; Proportionately spaced
| typeface (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family
| "Go" :height 1.0) ;; Monospaced typeface (set-
| face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Terminus" :height 1.0)
|
| Terminus is not Artwiz, but it's good enough.
|
| Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so
| mid-90's, but close.
| sprash wrote:
| > I think MGR has the greatest potential for a comeback because
| of its unique architecture
|
| I think so too. But this time with modern drawing primitives.
| Instead of lines an circles we need shaders and textures.
|
| In the end, even the most modern UI is nothing more than a
| terminal: Low bandwidth input from keyboard and mouse events and
| low bandwidth output (like draw checkbox at x,y). The rest is
| done by some drawing or blit routine which can be entirely
| managed on the GPU.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Fascinating seeing what you had to know to use these early
| desktops.
|
| All these desktop environments start out blank. By contrast
| modern desktop environments help you understand what you can do
| by showing always-present visual guides, cues to what's running
| now, & launchers. Windows 95's Start Menu is the most iconic
| tipping point for the trend of making it easy to see what you can
| do with your computer.
|
| Current LLMs show a blinking cursor. Yes they can call tools, run
| code, and generate images in styles you'll only know to ask for
| it you're an art expert. But right now you have to know those
| capabilities exist. Even experts forget to use them at times. And
| novices get frustrated that an LLM can't sort a list of names -
| even though all they have to do is ask it to write code for
| itself and the task will be easy.
|
| What will the AI "Start Menu" be!
| sillywalk wrote:
| Previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600
|
| 142 points by zdw on Oct 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 74
| comments
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