Indeed, NeWS was at the level of X11, but tuned to the hardware and networking set up we ended up having instead of the DEC 11/750<-very fast fiberoptic link->[display head with a 68000, 1MiB of memory, ~1 megapixels, i.e. pretty dumb, all this to get around government procurement law], but with Sun insisting on 6 figures to license it, it didn't have a chance.

Supposedly the major reason James Gosling insisted Sun not charge for Java runtimes and the SDK, he didn't want another major effort of his to fail for the same reason.