[Sussex] Does anyone have the O'Reilly book on "Playce"

[Mark Harrison]

Anyone got a copy of this - it's, as you might have guessed, out of print :-(

OK, you younger SLUGs are probably asking "what the (*&$ is Playce", so here
starteth the history lesson.

In the Unix market in the late 80s, and with the abstraction of display
technology that X brought, there were a whole bunch of Windows managers that
came out... Sun had "OpenWindows", then there was Motif, and, of course the MIT
Xwm.

The older SLUGs may remember that there were two different groups of developers,
one in Portugal of all places, one in the US who released fairly basic managers
called "Plaice". At least, the American one was called "Plaice", presumably on
the basis that all the good animal names had been taken :-) The Portuguese one
was called "Playce", as in the Portuguese for "to locate", which actually
sounded like quite a reasonable name (compared to, say, Windows!)

I am specifically looking for the O'Reilly book on "Playce".

The brouha was, of course, that in the early 90s, both groups became aware that
their products were being confused with each other, and there was a fairly messy
flame war on comp.sys.x.windowsmanagers which rather tarred everyone. In the
end, neither product was ported to linux, and both pretty much dropped out of
existence. Proving, for those who haven't seen this coming, that, today,
"there's no Plaice like Gnome."















----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoff Teale" <gteale at cmedltd.com>
To: <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 9:06 AM
Subject: Re: [Sussex] WebCam on Linux


> Geeeez, I leave you guys alone for a couple of days and look what happens...
> bad puns...