I remember sitting next to David Rosenthal at a conference reception (must have been FAST, which makes sense given his involvement with LOCKSS) in San Jose some time around 2010 or 2011, not knowing up front who he was. He explained some of the innovations he had made at NVIDIA around making the hardware more modular and easier for parallel teams to work on, and we chatted about the rumors I had heard about SUN thinking about licensing the Amiga hardware, which he confirmed but said would have been a bad idea, because the hardware didn't support address space protection. I guess I didn't know enough about him or NVIDIA to be sufficiently impressed at the time, but he was a very friendly and down to earth person.
That's right, he's a great down-to-earth guy (but he can still write like a passionate punk rocker -- see below), and there's a wealth of interesting thoughtful stuff on his blog. I've known him since the days of the X10 / X11 / NeWS window system wars.
He worked with James Gosling on Andrew at CMU and NeWS at Sun, and on X10 as well as X11 and ICCCM, and he implemented the original X10 compatibility layer that was in NeWS 1.0, before X11 was a "thing".
One of my favorite classics is his Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, developer of the Andrew Window Manager, X10, X11, and NeWS, employee #4 and chief scientist at Nvidia):
At the 1985 Alvey Workshop "Methodology of Window Management", David Rosenthal and James Gosling presented "System Aspects of Low-Cost Bitmapped Displays" and "A Window Manager for Bitmapped Displays and Unix" about their work on Andrew at CMU. And James presented "SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System" about his work at Sun, which was later renamed NeWS, and was what convinced David to leave CMU and join him at Sun.
Warren Teitelman's "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View" covers the fascinating history of Smalltalk, DLisp (Interlisp), Interlisp-D, Tajo (Mesa Development Environment), Docs (Cedar), Viewers (Cedar), SunWindows and SunDew systems:
Here's David Rosenthal's notorious Sun Deskset Environment flame that some rogue leaked to the Unix-Haters mailing list (inspiring the Unix-Haters Handbook's X-Windows chapter), in which he poignantly concluded:
"It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.":
From: DR
Date: 18 Oct 90 17:02:39 GMT
Newsgroups: sun.open-windows
Subject: Re: Deskset environment
[NS replied to me directly. Her reply illustrates the
reasons why I sent out yesterday's mail so perfectly that
I'm taking the liberty of copying my reply to
openwindows-interest]
> When we give standard Deskset presentations, a couple of
> things tend to "dazzle" the audience ...
>
> 1. Use the MT Calendar template to generate an
> appointment. Mail it to yourself, then
> drop it onto CM which will schedule it. The
> template is totally hokey (we're working on
> it) but it works and is wizzy.
>
> 2. Build a small application with GUIDE and make it
> on the spot. Show it up and running on XView
> in minutes. You can talk to BW about that
>
Thank you, but you have completely missed the point. I
don't want to show people how whizzy the standard default
desktop environment is. That's your job.
I want to give a talk about a quite different subject. I
merely want to *use* the desktop environment to achieve my
own ends. And as soon as I try to actually *use* it for
something instead of merely showing off the glitz, it falls
to pieces in my hands. Unfortunately, this is becoming all
too common in Sun products these days, because we no longer
*use* the things we build for anything but whizzy demos.
Have you ever actually tried to *use* the desktop for
anything? Like, say, printing a PostScript file? The
answer has to be no - because dropping a PostScript file on
the print tool doesn't work. Or binding a shell command to
a pattern? Again no, because doing so depends on
undocumented features of /etc/filetype. Even trying to
create a new icon from the standard set causes the icon
editor to dump core. I'm not joking when I say that I've
been filing a bug report every couple of hours of trying to
use the desktop. Its this kind of fragility that shows me
that I'm treading on fresh snow. No-one else has walked
this way.
And that is a truly sad commentary on the state of Sun -
no-one has been this way because no-one believes that
there's anything worth doing over this way. The reason Unix
was such an advance over previous operating systems was that
you could customize your environment in arbitrary ways.
With just a few shell scripts, for example. Its just like
the cold war - in our anxiety to compete with the enemy
we've ended up losing the things that made our way of life
worth defending in the first place. Like the freedom to
disagree with the authorities.
> I believe you're correct in saying that most people live
> with the default environment, but I think it's only partly
> because they don't know how to customize it. We've done
> some user testing and, surprisingly, people either prefer
> the default environment or just don't want to take the
> time to make it special. This is particularly true of
> people like admins, marketing, etc.
Testing whether people actually do customize their
environment is beside the point. Of course they don't. In
order to do it, I have to write C code using bizarre
features of Xview, exercise all my shell wizardry, and
dredge up undocumented features of the system from the
source. And you're suprised when admins can't do this? I
don't expect admins to do it. But I do expect ISVs and
Sun's SEs to be able to do it, and right now they can't.
PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out
that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM
doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind
of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show -
they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of
screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do
their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have
to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time?
They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with
fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient,
elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may
look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools
screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like
having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.
