NeWS
More info
- Creator
- James Gosling, David Rosenthal
- Owner
- Sun Microsystems
- Released
- 1986
- Type
- Window system
- Predecessor
- SunView
Sun's 1986 window system, in which clients sent PostScript programs to the server instead of finished drawing calls.
The Network extensible Window System, originally called SunDew, was built by James Gosling and David Rosenthal at Sun. At its heart sat a PostScript interpreter extended with windows, events and lightweight processes. An application could upload code that ran inside the server, so a button that highlighted itself on mouse-over never needed a round trip across the network. Shipping logic rather than pixels is the idea modern browsers run on — three decades early.
The catch was that writing a NeWS application meant writing PostScript, a stack language few people enjoyed, while X11 was free and already had every other vendor on board. Sun merged the two into the X11/NeWS server in OpenWindows and quietly retired NeWS in the early 1990s.