Date: Thu, 14 Aug 86 06:08:43 edt
From: don@borax.lcs.mit.edu (Donald E. Hopkins)
To: mark@mimsy.umd.edu, mgrant@mimsy.umd.edu, don@mimsy.umd.edu,
        chris@mimsy.umd.edu, adam@borax.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Brief incoherent synopsis ... (not brief, actually)


I am at Bandy's, typing on his Mac. I am having a wonderful time. Too
busy to type in as many details as there are, but today Gosling gave
me a demo of SunDew, his awesome new window system that's programmed
in PostScript. It's got light weight multitasking, and is very fast.
You've got COMPLETE control over everything, and can do things
you would never think possible. Windows of ANY shape, even with holes,
that you can scale to any size. He's got a terminal emulator window
that does an 80x24 terminal. When you stretch it, it scales the
font for whatever size you made it. I mean WHATEVER size. You can make it
as small as an icon and still see the text as dots. It can display
full color digitized pictures in any size, even ditherizing for black
and white if you want. He had a picture of the Sun founders standing in
front of a beautiful sunset, and stretched it all around, and they got
short and tall, and it processed the picture to any size. He made
it iconic, and it looked like a full color passport photo.
All this was automagic! He could do the same thing to a CAD/CAM window
that was on the screen! And the whole thing was lightning fast! I could
not believe something THAT sophisticated could run with such speed. It is
DEFINITLY faster than X, not to mention SunStools.
Excuse the raving incoherentness of this, but I am too completely
flabbergasted to disguise my enthusiasm. I read the PostScript manual
on the train to NJ and on the plane, and have not had a chance to
partake in any hands-on molestation of a postscript environment. I plan to
remidy that soon. I had an amusing time in a hot tub.
I got a tour of DECWRL from Brian Reid. Also got a tape with a map of
the world. Only 140 megabytes or so. Very detailed. We may stay till
Wednesday, and try to catch the Sun Local Users Group Meeting. Met Walter
Breen at the Chicago Airport going out west to SF! Stayed with Mitch
Bradley, who's got a Sun at home, which has hardware with very low
serial numbers, that he knows how to maintain due to having designed some
of it. He's integrated MicroEmacs with his incredible 68000 Forth system.
I've got a copy for the Amiga. He is porting SunDew to the Amiga. I saw it
running. He's working on keyboard and mouse input now, but the sun can make
it do things now over a serial port. PostScript is a religiously correct
language, and from what I have seen it do is damn powerful. One
contributing factor to the organization of this message is that I am
typing it into mail instead of using emacs. If I was in emacs, I would
stay there all night, so I will resist the temptation and bamboozle
you with with intense discontinuity instead.
At DECWRL there was room with more than 24 gigabytes of disk storage,
and a Vax with 128 Meg of Semiconductor memory, not to mention the 25
MIPS RISC workstations that they had just put together a few of. About 7
Vax 780, 780-5, and 785's. And in that room there was just one token VMS
machine, a 750. Eeeeeeeew!
I must stop myself from flaming on, so that I may sleep. I will
forward more details later. As you may guess, I am busy busy.

        -Don