Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

[Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com>]

small, possibly relevant anecdote...

> On Feb 13, 2021, at 18:49, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> Greg A. Woods writes:
>> 
>> At Sun, 24 Jan 2021 12:45:13 -0800, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> To the best of my knowledge, NeWS was the first window system to provide
>>> device-independent graphics.  You could just do things without having
>>> to mess around with counting pixels and figuring out what sort of color
>>> system was behind things.
>> 
> ...
> The question of device independent graphics is a hard one.  Device
> independent graphics had been around for a long time in terms of
> various display list processors that got mangled into things like
> CORE, GKS, and PHIGS.  But just because, for example, Sun provided
> a GKS package on top of SunView didn't make SunView device independent.

Dunno if anyone will find this interesting, but I hacked up a text-based
front end for SunCORE, back in 1983 or so.  IIRC, it was called iC, for
interpreted Core.  It read a line-oriented stream of ASCII commands and
argument lists.  After parsing these lines, it used the SunCORE library
to render the result.  I also wrote a utility to grab screen images and
dump them to a dot matrix printer.

The only "production" user for these hacks was my spouse, Vicki Brown.
She used them to generate graphics (e.g., dendograms) for her Master's
thesis (M.S. Microbiology, University of Maryland).  The source data
for the graphics was line printer plot output from a pair of UMD (IBM
and Univac) mainframes.

The text of the thesis was formatted using nroff and ms macros, then
printed on a Datel 30 (IBM I/O Selectric clone), using still more hacky
software.  I had to translate the ASCII to BCDIC, add shift and timing
characters, etc.  (But it all worked and got her thesis printed... :-)

Because the mainframe analysis programs used very different data formats,
Vicki created a third format for text entry, preafrooding, etc.  She
then transcoded the data using sed(1) and pushed it (at 300 BAUD) to UMD.
She then captured and downloaded the line printer files, transcoded back
to ASCII, and used awk(1) to boil down the line printer plots (which ran
on for MANY sheets of paper) so they would fit on single letter-size
pages.

Dr. Rita R. Colwell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_R._Colwell) was
her thesis advisor.  After accepting the thesis, she asked Vicki to
translate the AWK scripts into Fortran, so her team could render the
plots on a Calcomp plotter.  The translated code, predictably, was a great
deal larger (and took longer to run :-) than the AWK version.

-r

P.S.  Vicki and I learned awk(1) and sed(2) with the kind help of Jim
Joyce, who got me interested in Unix all those years ago...

P.P.S. Vicki has since moved through Perl to Python and such and would be
happy to find remote work as a data massager.  Please respond off-list...