So,
NeWS stands for "
Network extensible Window System" is a discontinued windowing system developed by
Sun Microsystems in the mid-80s.
I seriously *hate*
Sun Microsystems for their crappy SPARC architecture (specifically I don't like the window registers, because it makes debugging hell), but I have to admit NeWS was a good idea.
NeWS started by implementing a PostScript interpreter, then added a complete view hierarchy, and a complete model for events, including timers and other automatic events, input queues for devices such as mice and keyboards, and other functionality required for full interaction, so the input handling system was designed to provide strong event synchronization guarantees that were not possible with asynchronous protocols like X.
This means, NeWS was potentially better than X11 ... unfortunately slower due to bad implementation, and badly managed at the business level.
What is bad is that NeWS is based on PostScript, it talks PostScript, it's mostly programmed in PostScript, and for sure, you don't want to debug Postscript because it's too difficult hence to prone to carry bugs. But ... looking at the whole concept, how events are managed and handled, damn, it's not that bad and it could be rewritten in pure C nowadays, in a modern, compact, clean way.