[TUHS] Classic Unix workstation GUIs

Pat Barron patbarron at acm.org
Mon Aug 20 12:53:13 AEST 2012


On 8/19/2012 10:40 PM, Michael Kerpan wrote:
> The recent FOSS release of CDE has got me thinking of other Unix GUIs
> from the "golden age" of workstation Unix. Obviously, stuff like
> SunView and OpenWindows from Sun and 4DWM/Indigo Desktop from SGI are
> pretty well known, but I've always wondered what else was out there.So
> far, I've come across Looking Glass, DECWindows and HP VUE. Is there
> anything else of any importance/interest out there?
>

It was never commercial, but there was Virtue (later known as the Andrew 
Toolkit, and even later than that known as the Andrew User Interface 
System) - the windowing system developed at Carnegie Mellon University 
as part of the Andrew Project (an early campus-wide workstation 
computing initiative).  It started out as a completely self-contained 
user interface system, but (much) later was changed to use X11 to drive 
the workstation's display (in the early days of the Andrew Project, 
there was no X Window System....).

http://www.cmu.edu/corporate/news/2007/features/andrew/index.shtml

I still fondly recall using Andrew workstations (my favorites were the 
Sun-2's... :-) ) when I was working at CMU.

You could probably still find the older Virtue code if you look. Getting 
it to build on anything anymore - that's probably a more difficult 
problem.  ;-)

--Pat.



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