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Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

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Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#11

Post by anthk »

bitwize wrote: post #8
breadwinner wrote: post #2

> 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 com…

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 therewit…

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.

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#12

Post by sprash »

> 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.

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#13

Post by skissane »

buescher wrote: post #3

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.

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)

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#14

Post by bitwize »

anthk wrote: post #11
bitwize wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 therewit…

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…

> 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.

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#15

Post by cadamsdotcom »

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!

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#17

Post by anthk »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #9
anthk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 we…

Running X with 8MB of RAM? Emacs perfectly ran on TTY's, and for web browser Lynx worked. Images? You would get a SVGAlib viewer.

With 16MB of RAM, and FVWM and RXvt (xvt before) ran circles around a Sparc with CDE and DTTerm/Xterm.

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#18

Post by hulitu »

breadwinner wrote: post #2

> 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 com…

> What have we accomplished in the last 35 years?

Just do an ldd on a random program on your machine. Or check how many libraries are doing the same thing (SSL, jpeg, NSS, etc).

If you are really brave, you can compare a "make menuconfig" between linux 2.4.x and linux 4.x.

Do we need all this ?

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#19

Post by hulitu »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #9
anthk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 we…

> throughput awful. Start up times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading.

Wellcome to Windows 11 /s

Re: Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

#20

Post by hulitu »

anthk wrote: post #4

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.

Thanks. The url shall be with http, though.
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