RE: NeWS as prior art?

On Mon, 2003-09-01 at 10:44, Richard M. Smith wrote:
> Sounds promising.  Did NeWS also allow external programs to take over a
> part of a NeWS window and display content in it?  A simple example might
> a clock program that runs on the client side.
> 

If I can recall back that far (around 1988 :) X11 was actually a thread
running in the NeWS server (xnews) so that applications could poke
through their own content.

The basic idea of NeWS was that the user interface part of an
application (i.e., drawing  a selection box) would run on the local
machine and simply send the higher-level results (i.e. the two corners
of the selection) to an application running on a server. The side-effect
of this was lower network bandwidth requirements than X11 (only two
co-ordinates are sent at the end of an operation rather than each mouse
movement). 

Gil

Received on Monday, 1 September 2003 12:52:14 UTC