Re:An open letter to Richard M. Stallman
by hga on Sunday January 11, 2015 @10:59AM
(#8870259)
Yeah, I suspected so.
DEC had a problem with selling MIT and other non-profits hardware at a discount, the US Federal government demands Most Favored Customer prices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-Favoured-Customer_Clause), so I heard they came up with a not so desirable configuration of a Vax 11-750, a RK07 disk drive, and a VAXstation 100 display, which was a 68000 with a megabyte or so of memory and a very fast connection to the VAX.
Which I was also told had an outsized influence on the X architecture, its assumptions of a fast connection to a relatively dumb display, very much the opposite of what developed in longer term.
Which was a motivation for Sun's NeWS, which sent interactive PostScript to the display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS We aren't using it/you've never heard of it because of the "MIT License" vs. Sun wanting $100K to even give you a taste of NeWS.
DEC had a problem with selling MIT and other non-profits hardware at a discount, the US Federal government demands Most Favored Customer prices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-Favoured-Customer_Clause), so I heard they came up with a not so desirable configuration of a Vax 11-750, a RK07 disk drive, and a VAXstation 100 display, which was a 68000 with a megabyte or so of memory and a very fast connection to the VAX.
Which I was also told had an outsized influence on the X architecture, its assumptions of a fast connection to a relatively dumb display, very much the opposite of what developed in longer term.
Which was a motivation for Sun's NeWS, which sent interactive PostScript to the display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS We aren't using it/you've never heard of it because of the "MIT License" vs. Sun wanting $100K to even give you a taste of NeWS.