[TUHS] The MGR window system and the Macintosh

[Bakul Shah]

> On Aug 4, 2022, at 2:14 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 3:46 PM John Floren <john at jfloren.net> wrote:
>> [snip]
>> Does anyone know more about MGR, particularly on the Mac? That page has
>> the source for MGR 0.69, but there's no mention of the Macintosh in it
>> (aside from comments about how it was supported on older versions...)
> 
> I got it working once under FreeBSD back in the 4.x days.
> 
> It wasn't particularly notable, or at least didn't leave much of an
> impression; it presented a pretty "standard" (and primitive!)
> graphical experience. I believe it was monochrome, with amber
> on black.
> 
> I don't know anything about it on the Mac, I'm afraid; I suspect it
> probably ran in a Window under Finder, but that is pure speculation.

From its wikipedia entry:

    The initial Macintosh port was done on a Macintosh Plus
    computer using the Lightspeed C compiler. It was a hybrid
    port in that many of the low-level operations were passed
    on to QuickDraw instead of using the internal bitmap
    code. The application did not conform to the Macintosh
    user interface guidelines as it took over the entire
    screen. The initial version used either available serial
    port as the communications channel. A later update of the
    port could use either ethernet or serial communications.

[No reference to how this was obtained]

MGR reference manual (from Stephen A. Uhler's home page):
https://sau.homeip.net/papers/mgrman.pdf

Architecture and Design of the MGR Window System:
https://sau.homeip.net/papers/arch.pdf

Here it says a port to Macintosh-Plus was done in two weeks.