I was always fascinated by NeWS - Wikipedia . Does someone know an emulator running NeWS? (I found Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (SPARC) but this a little bit too new 
)
Cheers, Felix
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Some has NeWS running. @dvrc.bsky.social on Bluesky
I’ll have to put all the stuff I found on some repo that anyone van clone.
Anyway, QEMU 8.0.5 is the last version working for SunOS 4.1.4.
NeWS 1.1 comes from Don Hopkins archives, and GoodNeWS comes from Sun User Group 89 tar from John Gilmore
I believe these are links to Hopkins’ archive. NeWS - Computer History Wiki
UniPress Emacs under NeWS. DVRC: "(Mandatory reupload) Sun #NeWS 1.1 running on Sun…" - mastodon.cloud
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Great find! From that last link, a screen capture:
(I did find NeWS rather difficult to search for…)
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The thing with an eye is a “pie menu”. Don Hopkins worked on those, probably when he was a NeWS programmer at Sun. Are they in the Sims game too? Hopkins also worked at UniPress.
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I remember using a window manager on Linux in the mid-90s that had pie menus and was accompanied by a document extolling the virtues of pie menus for experienced and inexperienced computer users, alike. As I recall, it was a riff on one of the contemporary extensions of twm that supported virtual desktops.
I have never seen or used them before or since.
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I developed using NeWS for many years - first during my PhD, my entire project was written in NeWS and then I worked at Canon Research Europe where we used NeWS for all the UI work.
Its such a fun environment to work in - somewhere along the years I lost all my code for it 
4 -2 roll pop pop FTW
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And when I discovered James Gosling (the author of NeWS) had done an AtariST (prototype) port I was totally smitten!
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That’s very interesting! I searched online, but didn’t find anything about this. In part because “NeWS” isn’t a good search term… Do you have any links to more information about the Atari ST port? Do you think it still exists?
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“Network extensible Window System” gives the hint. Rather than sending protocol like X11 used: “draw a line, draw a dot”, NeWS sent executable programs that persisted on the client. If you wanted to fill the display with a dot every 10 pixels, sending protocol to draw each dot is a lot less efficient that sending a for-loop to draw them all.
Certainly I recall the source we had for NeWS still had #ifdefs for AtariST, whether it built I couldn’t say.
NeWS is interesting - its combines a coding language based on Forth with the now famous imaging model of PostScript. The latter breaks your head at first - for example to print a page of text, you draw a single black rectangle - but you set the clipping shape for the rectangle to the sum of all the outlines of the letters on the page! Bizarre but crazy powerful.
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This is reminding me of something Alan Kay has been a big fan of; the idea of “sending a computer (processor),” rather than a command/protocol. Though, I find his terminology confusing re. this, because he was talking about this in the context of how PostScript worked. I thought in that case, you’re sending a drawing, or a text document, translated to PostScript. So, you’re not sending a “processor.” You’re sending some semantics to a processor that can interpret it. Though, you could send a processor that could aid in the rendering.
Re. setting up the clipping rectangle
I take it what you’re calling an “outline” would be what I’d call a “frame” around each letter? That would make more sense to me. Each being a rectangle, add them together, and you get your clipping rectangle for the page.
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No, its much more groovy than that. 
PostScript is not “rectangle based” like most other graphics systems. Its entirely “path based”. So you create a clippath from the characters you want which captures every curve that defines each character glyph (these are Truetype fonts) and clips the “ink” through that clippath!
This is why NeWS had a whole bunch of window systems / pop-up menus with crazy shapes - because anything can (geometrically) clip anything else.
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: I did find NeWS rather difficult to search for…
Indeed: Sony NEWS - Wikipedia
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At page 119 of the USENIX Summer 1989 proceedings there is a paper about the porting of X/NeWS to Atari ST, but somewhere there was a mention of a NeWS 1.1 porting.
On the comp.windows.news group is reported a porting to the Amiga, which couldn’t be distributed since that the author didn’t got the license (probably he get the sources at university).
Anyway, there is a copy of the NeWS 1.1 Sun tree https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/, including the missing operators.h. Some files are still corrupted, but a BIN distribution with the pristine ps files recently appeared on BitSavers.
For those who want to emulate it, SunOS 4.1.x works fine, I haven’t tried yet SunOS 4.0 or 3.5 (not having neither a Sun-3 or a Sun-4).
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Good to see you here, @DVRC. Could you perhaps publish installation instructions (or a script) that work provided you have downloaded necessary tarballs yourself?
Relevant to this, it seems NeWSprint has appeared. I don’t know what that is, but Don Hopkins told me it’s of interest.bagley-nottingham-tapes/photos/20260415_101822.jpg at master · larsbrinkhoff/bagley-nottingham-tapes · GitHub
As far as I know NeWSprint was a RIP to drive printers that didn’t have PS support. Sun had also some printers like the Sparcprinter and the NeWSprinter. The only version archived now is the 2.5, which runs on Solaris 2.1.
Anyway, among the tapes there are the Sun-3 and Sun-4 binary copies of OpenWindows 1.0/1.0.1, which is the “missing link” between NeWS 1.1 and OpenWindows 2.0 (this one was distributed with SunOS 4.1.x), since that before it was a standalone product.
According to old posts on the comp.windows.news, it was criticized for its poor performance and RAM requirements (which OW 2.0 later fixed), and some stuff wasn’t implemented (like charpath).
It also came with a window manager called “pswm” that later versions lacked (and in the OpenWindows 2.0 sources there is a directory with that name, but it’s empty), since it was replaced by olwm.
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