> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steven J. Owens [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Sunday, November 08, 1998 10:39 PM
> Uhm, Bob, don't take this the wrong way, but NextStep is a
> UNIX-based operating system... A damn good one in some ways, too.
I wouldn't define it that way. NeXTSTEP runs on top of the Mach
kernel, sometimes called the "microkernel." Mach, of course, was
written by the people at CMU without reference to prior UNIX
implementation, and most of them then went on to Microsoft to
write Windows NT. NeXTSTEP at one time supported UNIX compatibility,
in much the same way that NT has POSIX compatibility, and the file
system is the same Project MAC/Multics/Unix flavor that has been
around since computers had vacuum tubes.
> I've always thought it was a shame that more of the NextStep
> concepts didn't flourish.
Gotta agree with you there. The O-O aspects of the app interface
were fantastic. I was disappointed, though, with the way the
GUI worked out in practice. I was always a big fan of PostScript,
did huge amounts of hacking in it, but Display PostScript just
didn't seem to live up to the promise. We obviously need a simpler
rendering language, say along the lines of SGML with DTDs but
not so complex or general. Maybe ... HTML! (with CSS and XML).
No, wait, that would make the browser part of the OS.
> ...
> (* Although I do really dislike the way Microsoft has appropriated the
> perfectly normal and general world "Windows" to mean their specific
> product. It's MICROSOFT Windows, dammit!).
Another echo from the anti-IBM rhetoric of the 60's and 70's
that's being born again as anti-Microsoft paranoia. IBM called
their operating system OS, their programming language PL1,
their virtual memory system VM, and their database DB1.
What we really should do is come up with a better word (or term).
These things don't work like real windows; have you ever seen
a house with multiple overlapping windows of different sizes?
I kind of like "pages," and the other use of pages for VM
management is so buried in the OS that no one will see it as
a misuse. If a screen is a "desktop" (another metaphor that
I'm uncomfortable with), then the rectangular things scattered
around it are "pages" or "sheets" or "documents," not windows.
Bob Munck
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