[breadwinner]

> 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.

[bitwize]

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]

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]

> 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.

[hulitu]

> 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 ?

[anthk]

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]

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.

[anthk]

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.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah mostly I did what you said (terminal emacs, lynx/gopher). There did come an era (late 94, 95) before I could afford to upgrade to e.g. Pentium or higher class machine but after which it was important to be able to run e.g. Netscape to Do Things For the Real World.

[hulitu]

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

Wellcome to Windows 11 /s