[agumonkey]

> The little "e" in NeWS stands for "extensible".

But maybe that capital N is for Non .. (kidding obviously)

I've always been curious about NeWS but the web is quite short of demos about it (not helped by newspapers called Sun either). Do you know sites with videos about it ?

[DonHopkins]

Thanks for asking! ;) I've put up some old demos on youtube, and made illustrated transcriptions of some, and written some papers and articles. Sorry the compression is so terrible on some of the videos. Here are some links:

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

PSIBER Space Deck and Pseudo Scientific Visualizer Demo. Demo of the PseudoScientific Visualizer and NeWS PSIBER Space Deck. Research performed under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and documented thanks to the support of John Gilmore and Julia Menapace. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fqCeuue5Ac

Pseudo Scientific Visualizer. Demo of the NeWS PseudoScientific Visualizer and the PSIBER Space Deck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GatM3s2S75Q

Mousee Demo. Demo of Mousee running in the NeWS Window System.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRP2QorRDUw

Ben Shneiderman introduces Pie Menus developed by Don Hopkins at UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab. University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab Pie Menu Demos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxkfqgAkgDc

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser. By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-to-facilitate-brows...

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing. Demo of NeWS based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS. Demo of UniPress Emacs based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. Tabbed window management with pie menus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

Just the Pie Menus from All the Widgets. Pie menu demo excerpts from "All The Widgets" CHI'90 Special Issue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review, produced by and narrated by Brad Meyers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE

Precision Pie Demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c

Handy Pie Menu Demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuA_yylYwjM

How To Choose with Pie Menus. Early pie menu demo by Don Hopkins, on NeWS 1.0, running on a Sun 3 workstation. Featuring the World's Most Enormous Pie Menu, and Direct PacManipulation!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOJaY6Xu7ao

NeWS Tab Window Demo. Demo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)). HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...

HyperLook SimCity Demo Transcript. This is a transcript of a video taped demonstration of SimCity on HyperLook in NeWS.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transc...

HyperLook Demo. Demonstration of SimCity running under the HyperLook user interface development system, based on NeWS PostScript, running on a SPARCstation 2. Includes a demonstration of editing HyperLook graphics and user interfaces, the HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, and the HyperLook Happy Tool. Also shows The NeWS Toolkit applications PizzaTool and RasterRap. HyperLook developed by Arthur van Hoff and Don Hopkins at the Turing Institute. SimCity ported to Unix and HyperLook by Don Hopkins. HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, Happy Tool, The NeWS Toolkit, PizzaTool and Raster Rap developed by Don Hopkins. Demonstration, transcript and close captioning by Don Hopkins. Camera and interview by Abbe Don. Taped at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY

The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool. How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...

The X-Windows Disaster. This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

[gnufx]

If you can find a library copy, The NeWS Book (e.g. https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-news-book/james-gosling...) might also be of interest for a static view, but I don't know how much was actually implemented, and I'm away from my copy.

I haven't had a chance to look at the videos for old time's sake, and they may make the point: a big part of it, as a developer experimenting with things, was the mode-less Smalltalk-like environment which allowed you to modify the system on the fly. (I don't know how much like, since I never used Smalltalk.)

Edit: "Scott McNealy ate my window system" :-(

[DonHopkins]

Here it is!

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Boo...

The ability to "psh" to the NeWS server and play around with PostScript (much like the Chrome Developer Tools now lets you do with JavaScript) was crucial to making NeWS fun.

The PSIBER Space Deck was trying to make a visual Smalltalk-like or Lisp-Machine-like development and debugging environment for NeWS, that let you visually browse and edit PostScript code and data structures and objects and processes in the system.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989

Written by Don Hopkins, October 1989. University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Computer Science Department, College Park, Maryland 20742.

Abstract

The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.

[DonHopkins]

Here's some fun stuff about NeWS and screen snapshots of the HyperTies hypermedia browser and Emacs authoring tool that I scanned (after printing them out as slides for a talk, then losing the original images) -- HyperTIES supported formatted hypertext, raster, and PostScript graphics, with plug-in extensible interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript, including pie menus, pop-up embedded image targets, widgets, form controls, scrolling text editors, etc. These screen snapshots were slides for a talk about building user interfaces in NeWS, using HyperTIES to explain and demonstrate itself and the technology it was implemented with:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/NeWS/BuildingUserInter...

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-to-facilitate-brows...

And here are some ideas about visual programming and programming by demonstrations that I was thinking about while developing PSIBER, like a visually programmable window shell environment:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/NeWS/spike.txt

And a few more PSIBER screen snapshots:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/NeWS/PSIBER.pdf

[agumonkey]

Oh yeah some are compressed to death. But most are ok. The precision pie curved lever was mindblowing, and I've seen some !

[rossjudson]

This should be a top-level article.