[TUHS] Four windowing systems on SunOS

Ronald Natalie ron at ronnatalie.com
Tue Nov 1 05:59:44 AEST 2022


My favorite SunView story was the day I was working in the Pentagon (I 
was ron at hq.af.mil for a while).    One of the Sun workstations had a 
Sunview screen lock running and the guy I was visiting was on the phone. 
    I told him I’d just unlock the thing myself.    I promptly set forth 
to do so and got it open.    He quickly said, “I have to hang up and go 
check on something,” and came over and asked how I’d done that.

The screen lock was just a very large window forced to the top of 
everything on the screen.   If you hit the hot key to iconify it, you 
had a fraction of a second to interact before it reasserted itself.   So 
you keep hitting iconify and maybe getting a letter or two typed into 
one of the one terminal windows at a time.   You run ps, find the pid of 
the screen lock process, and kill it.

-Ron



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