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

#1

Post by hualapais » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)
oldvcr.blogspot.com

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

#2

Post by breadwinner » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 6:00 PM UTC

> 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.

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

#3

Post by buescher » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 6:25 PM UTC

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.

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

#4

Post by anthk » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

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.

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

#5

Post by anthk » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 7:41 PM UTC

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 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?...

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

#6

Post by cmrdporcupine » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 7:47 PM UTC

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.

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.

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

#7

Post by anthk » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 7:48 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#8

Post by bitwize » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

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 therewith, copypasta-ing entire email threads and even a PostScript pie menu implementation.

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

#9

Post by cmrdporcupine » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #7

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…

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 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.

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

#10

Post by anthk » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 7:59 PM UTC

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.