From: Fred Kleinsorge [kleinsorge@star.enet.dec_nospam.com]
Sent: Monday, August 30, 1999 12:59 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Re: Tornadoes, Chasms, and OpenVMS Marketing

Jerry Leichter wrote:
> ... 
> Another telling example from about the same time:  Before there was X,
> DEC workstations used a windowing system call UIS (aka VWS - there were
> real distinctions in what the names meant, but they are irrelevant now).
> VWS was entirely home-grown.  It did have some nice features.  For
> example, where in X you do everything in pixels - so your code, or (you
> hope) some intermediate library) gets to adjust for screen resolution -
> VWS specified everything in real-world units of centimeters.  The lowest
> levels of the system worried about doing the conversions to pixels for
> you.  That was fine as far as it went, but what was telling was one
> little sentence in the internal product specifications for VWS:  All
> such values were specified to be in VAX FP format, *only*.  The document
> called this a major advantage, since it would prevent others from
> cloning VWS.  (When it became clear that the world had zero interest in
> cloning VWS - and all too little in even *running* it - later versions
> of the spec dropped this little sentence.  There was a grand "woods
> meeting" not long after in which it was decided to jetison VWS and
> produce DECwindows based on X instead.)
> 
> I spoke to a friend in VMS marketing about this at the time, and was
> told the the VMS group defined its mission as creating world-class
> *proprietary* customer solutions.
> ...


Not that I have to tell you this Jerry...

VWS (and later the programming interface for it called UIS) was invented
by Tim Halverson et al back in the good old days when VMS was the 800lb
gorilla in Digital, and Not-Invented-Here was their war cry.  So instead
of doing the rational thing (like using GIDIS as the programming
interface ;-), a team of non-graphics, non-workstation literate,
crackerjack O/S developers created a window system that, by definition,
was VMS-specific.  Hell, the terminal emulator ran in Kernel mode.  It
was designed to really do 3 things well:  Terminals (after all character
cell interfaces are still the norm on VMS); GKS; and WYSIWYG text
editing (a lot of effort went into sub-pixel positioning and font
scaling, rotation, and other manipulations).

The decision to kill VWS/UIS came as a result of a meeting held at Heald
Pond, where the question was how to create a single uniform application
interface across all the OS's, instead of the multitude of interfaces
that existed at the time.  In addition, this was at the time that upper
management was taking their eye off the ball, and worrying about UNIX
and Open Systems (rather than keeping our Corporate focus on VMS).  The
switch to a UNIMPLEMENTED and INFERIOR standard (X11) was based in part
on the idea that it was not feasible to port VWS.   X11 (or at the time
X10, certainly X11R1 Beta wasn't ready) was the result of a external
(but DEC funded) project at MIT, which meant it might become the
industry standard, it was what the UNIX group wanted to say the least. 
And lastly - it was only intended to be thindustry standard, it was what the UNIX group wanted to say the least. 
And lastly - it was only intended to be the low-level, network
transparent graphics/window infrastructure... "real" programs would
never code to it's calls... an application interface (which I will not
name, but which is the most successful in the world now) would be used -
*if* we could license it.  Of course, that never happened, we wrote XUI,
then merged with OSF/Motif as the GUI/API.

If there is any point in this, it is that VWS was the result of a
VMS-specific design, at a time when the entire focus of DEC was
VAX/VMS.  In it's day, VWS was about the best there was.  The wildly
successful VS2000 would have killed the fledgling non-VMS workstation
business (and at the time VMS *owned* the workstation business) if we
had cut the price in half.  The switch OFF of VWS/UIS to X11 occurred
when DEC lost it's focus on VMS, and started searching for ways to
leverage the huge investments being made in applications across multiple
operating system (and hardware, remember the PDP11 wasn't "quite" dead)
domains.  That is, it occured at the point where IMHO the slide of both
VMS and DEC began, because without the focus VMS had given it, the
company drifted and tore itself apart from within.  Nothing ever
replaced VMS as a single unifying strength.