Subject: NeWS-makers mailing list

From: Don Hopkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 86 14:23:42 EST

This is to announce the inception of a mailing list for the discussion
of NeWS: the Network/extensible Window System. Its Internet address is
"[email-masked]", and the uucp address is
"...!seismo!mimsy!NeWS-makers". Administrivial matters (such as
requests for additions to and deletions from the list) should be sent
to NeWS-makers-request. The studly capitalization of the address is
not necessary.

NeWS, originally called SunDew, was written primarily by James
Gosling, at Sun Microsystems, who is well known for his Unix Emacs. In
a nutshell, NeWS is an extensible multitasking window system
environment. It consists of a network based display server that is
controlled and programmed in PostScript, Adobe's page description
language. NeWS was designed to be a portable, device independent
window system development platform that runs on a wide range of
hardware, in a distributed heterogeneous environment.

Within the address space of the NeWS server, lightweight PostScript
processes communicate and interact with each other by sharing data,
and passing around events and messages. Clients may communicate with
processes by sending them PostScript commands and source code, that is
interpreted and executed in the server, or by invoking functions in
the server that communicate in different ways. PostScript running in
the NeWS server can implement whatever protocols and data compression
schemes are useful for communicating with clients. NeWS provides the
tools to implement the user and programmer interfaces of other window
systems, such as SunView, Apple Macintosh, Interlisp-D, MS Windows,
and even the X window system.

NeWS is to most other window systems as Emacs is to most other
editors. There is no doubt that extensible systems allow degrees of
freedom that "hard wired" systems simply cannot provide.

	-Don
	 ([email-masked], ...!seismo!mimsy!don)