# NeWS: A Thing of Beauty that failed to thrive

## What is it?

NeWS is Sun's Network Extensible Window System. It was based on Sun's implementation of PostScript (not Adobe's Display PostScript, which was used in Solaris 2.3 and later), with numerous extentions for use as an extensible window system.

## History, or Why Did it Fail?

It was invented at around the same time as X10, but was not released in source code form and only ran on Sun platforms, so the result was inevitable -- the technically far-inferior X10 and later X11 took over.

## TnT, HyperLook, etc

There were several toolkits. TnT, The NeWS Toolkit, was from Sun, and accompanied by a program called CPS, which translated pseudo-PostScript into C.

HyperLook, from The Turing Institute, was an alternative runtime environment and toolkit.

## What's here on disk?

- There are several TnT demos including a terminal emulator, games, modifications, etc.
- CyberSpace, a graphics tool
- The HyperLook runtime .
- gterm, a flexible terminal emulator
- ice, a powerful object-oriented draw program
- news-tape, the NeWS Tape from UMD.
- An awesome pdb C to PostScript translator
- tnt, the TnT stuff mentioned above.
- TNT2, the older version of Sun's The NeWS Toolkit