OxidePad Laptop product based on Helios with NeWS Window System. When?

That would be kind of cool.

I know Don Hopkins hangs out here sometimes, but the big question is did NeWS source code ever get liberated from the depths of Mordoracle?

I don't really know. I was just trying to come up with some obscure references. Solaris on desktop wasn't crazy enough.

I think a modern take on NeWS style system would use Webassembly style system with capability based access rather then PostScript and no security. Basically a modern browser with Canves/WebGL and without a lot of other stuff a browser does.

Would have been a interesting alternative to the Wayland approach.

Kind of sad that Scott McNealy didn't have the balls to open it up. Having some real competition to X in the 90s would have been a cool. Specially if Sun had pushed it at least somewhat.

Naw, Sun never liberated it.

Sun did announced "NeWS is Free (only $1000)" which was kind of a kick in the balls and abuse of the word "free".

"Free (only $1000)" discussion on usenet:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.news/c/-G1l_372AP8/...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.news/c/YtZzYMZ587M/...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.sug/c/IXcXK7hKgUQ/m/nf8...

A couple of my flames about the situation:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt

And to cleanse the palette, DSRH's epic "Sun Deskset == Roy Lichtenstein Painting on your Bedroom Wall" flame (David SH Rosenthal was one of the original authors of NeWS, with James Gosling, and also wrote the X11 ICCCM):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768724

There needs to be a dev kit of sorts. I’d be happy to recommend Oxide to some of our customers but not before I try it first. And I’m not buying a whole data centre just to play around?

Yeah definitely. I used to work for an AI hardware company that only sold $150k systems to "POA" customers. I think part of the reason they didn't do very well is it was completely inaccessible to normal people.

Maybe they could rent a rack with a somewhat direct access on a per-month basis or something so we can POC around, but that could turn them into a cloud company which is probably not what they want.

It's still early days for us obviously, but we have some of our equipment in a cage in a regular colocation facility, on the Internet. We're generally able to provide access to systems there so that folks can kick the tyres as part of a pre-sales engagement. If you or your customers are interested, you're always welcome to reach out to our sales folks and have a chat!

I hear you. We currently have space on a rack allocated for potential customers to kick the tires, but it's not more broadly available than that.