I haven't had a chance to look at the videos for old time's sake, and they may make the point: a big part of it, as a developer experimenting with things, was the mode-less Smalltalk-like environment which allowed you to modify the system on the fly. (I don't know how much like, since I never used Smalltalk.)
The ability to "psh" to the NeWS server and play around with PostScript (much like the Chrome Developer Tools now lets you do with JavaScript) was crucial to making NeWS fun.
The PSIBER Space Deck was trying to make a visual Smalltalk-like or Lisp-Machine-like development and debugging environment for NeWS, that let you visually browse and edit PostScript code and data structures and objects and processes in the system.
The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989
Written by Don Hopkins, October 1989.
University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Computer Science Department, College Park, Maryland 20742.
Abstract
The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.
Here's some fun stuff about NeWS and screen snapshots of the HyperTies hypermedia browser and Emacs authoring tool that I scanned (after printing them out as slides for a talk, then losing the original images) -- HyperTIES supported formatted hypertext, raster, and PostScript graphics, with plug-in extensible interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript, including pie menus, pop-up embedded image targets, widgets, form controls, scrolling text editors, etc. These screen snapshots were slides for a talk about building user interfaces in NeWS, using HyperTIES to explain and demonstrate itself and the technology it was implemented with:
And here are some ideas about visual programming and programming by demonstrations that I was thinking about while developing PSIBER, like a visually programmable window shell environment:
I haven't had a chance to look at the videos for old time's sake, and they may make the point: a big part of it, as a developer experimenting with things, was the mode-less Smalltalk-like environment which allowed you to modify the system on the fly. (I don't know how much like, since I never used Smalltalk.)
Edit: "Scott McNealy ate my window system" :-(