[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[Aharon Robbins]

Another reason the 5620 was botched so badly was that AT&T wanted >=
$2000 for the development kit (read: C compiler and libraries) for it.
Not a good way to get lots of 3rd party application developers
on your bandwagon.

I used one for a year or so; it was the first windowing system I'd
used and the only one I've really liked. For about 10 years I've been
using 9wm, which gives a similar feel (at least to me). Those who want
to go all the way should adopt 9term as well.  (I generally run xterm +
bash these days, although for a long while it was 9term + es/rc.)

Somewhere, I have an X version of the 5620 font.  I found that it
wasn't so pretty. I've been using the pelm-latin1-9 font from the sam
distribution for years.

Norman forgot to mention that the most long-lived split-design application
is Rob Pike's sam editor, still available for X11 and still in use on
Plan 9.

Arnold

[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[A.P.Garcia]

> I've been using this window system more or less daily since August 1984,
> though only at home since I left Bell Labs in 1990.  (I am using it to
> type this message.)

!
what other hardware and software do you run, if you don't mind my noseyness?

[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[Norman Wilson]

  22. Pike, R. "The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal". _AT&T Bell
  Laboratories Technical Journal 63_, 8 (Oct. 1984).

Rob described an earlier version of the Blit work in a USENIX talk
at USENIX in January 1982 (Santa Monica CA).  So far as I know it
was just a talk, no paper, though he showed a canned demo on video
tape.

For those who don't know it, the Blit (in later versions called the
Jerq; in official product version, the AT&T 5620 DMD terminal, and
later the 630 and 730) is a separate terminal with a bitmapped display,
keyboard, and mouse.  The window system runs in the terminal; a
multiplexed-channel protocol (one channel per window) is used to
communicate with the host computer; a (user-mode) multiplexer program
on the host passes data for each channel to and from an appropriate
local process (group), one per channel.  Creating a new window in
the terminal tells the multiplexer to create a new process in the host.
By default the window is just a terminal (and the process is a shell),
but it is possible for a host program to download a program into the
terminal (where it can get at the screen and mouse directly) to act
on its behalf just for its own window; that's how graphical programs
work.  This often requires programs to be split into front and back
ends, but often that turns out to be a good idea anyway, keeping
user-interface work and file-manipulation and computation separate.
It also means much less communication bandwidth is needed; in fact
the communication line is RS232 (what else would you expect in 1982?).
It worked fine, even at 1200 bps, except when a large graphical front-
end program had to be loaded, but people tended to load such programs
once and keep them running.

I've been using this window system more or less daily since August 1984,
though only at home since I left Bell Labs in 1990.  (I am using it to
type this message.)  It is Spartan by modern standards--menus are short
and to-the-point, windows are not surrounded by fancy borders and icons,
there is no `desktop' or `graphical user environment'--it's just good
old UNIX in multiple windows, with a terminal window that makes good use
of the mouse for local editing, and provision to run fancier programs
when necessary.  It wouldn't work well for graphics-heavy work unless
the communication line could be greatly sped up--a web browser would be
hard to make work well unless all the pictures were left out.  But it's
well thought out, with a nice balance between spareness and function.  I
still like it better than any other window system I've seen; even Rob's
more recent work in Plan 9 seems to me over-elaborate by comparison.  I
also like much better the overall model that the terminal is a client
rather than a server; X11 always seemed inside-out to me.

I am still disappointed that the process of turning the Blit from a
research tool to a salable product was botched so badly.  If memory
serves, not only did it take several years longer than it should have
done, but when the 5620 hit the streets in early 1984 it cost a mere
$6000, which even in those days was outrageous for a terminal.  (None
of this was Rob's fault so far as I know.)  If things had gone better,
the UNIX windowing world might have turned out quite different.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[A.P.Garcia]

> Can someone advise me regarding when the GUIs became a standard feature on
> UNIX?  Or operating systems whose ancestry was indeed UNIX?

MIT/LCS/TR-368, _The X Window System_, by Scheifler and Gettys, is dated
October 1986.  Here are a couple paragraphs from the introduction:

X is the result of the simultaneous need for a window system from two
separate groups at MIT.  In the summer of 1984, the Argus system [15]
at the Laboratory for Computer Science needed a debugging environment
for multi-process distributed applications, and a window system seemed
the only viable solution.  Project Athena [4] was faced with dozens,
and eventually thousands of workstations with bitmap displays, and
needed a window system to make the display useful.  Both groups were
starting with the Digital VS100 display [13] and VAX hardware, but it
was clear at the outset that other architectures and displays had to
be supported.  In particular, IBM workstations with bitmap displays of
unknown type were expected eventually within Project Athena.
Portability was therefore a goal from the start.  Although all of the
initial implementation work was for Berkeley Unix, it was clear that
the network protocol should not depend on aspects of the operating
system.

The name X derives from the lineage of the system.  At Stanford
University, Paul Asente and Brian Reid had begun work on the W window
system [3], as an alternative to VGTS [12, 21] for the V system [5].
Both VGTS and W allow network-transparent access to the display, using
the synchronous V communication mechanism.  Both systems provide "text"
windows for ASCII terminal emulation.  VGTS provides graphics windows
driven by fairly high-level object definitions from a structured display
file; W provides graphics windows based on a simple display-list
mechanism, with limited functionality.  We acquired a Unix-based version
of W for the VS100 (with synchronous communication over TCP [23]) done
by Asente and Chris Kent at Digital's Western Research Laboratory.  From
just a few days of experimentation, it was clear that a network-
transparent hierarchical window system was desirable, but that restricting
the system to any fixed set of application-specific modes was completely
inadequate.  It was also clear that, although synchronous communication
was perhaps acceptable in the V system (due to very fast networking
primitives), it was completely inadequate in most other operating
environments.  X is our "reaction" to W.  The X window hierarchy comes
directly from W, although numerous systems have been built with hierarchy
in at least some form [10, 14, 17, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35].  The
asynchronous communication protocol used in X is a significant improvement
over the synchronous protocol used in W, but is very similar to that used
in Andrew [9, 19].  X differs from all of these systems in the degree to
which both graphics functions and "system" functions are pushed back
(across the network) as application functions, and in the ability to
transparently tailor desktop management.



3. Asente. P. W Reference Manual. Stanford University, 1984. internal document.

4. Balkovich, E., Lerman, S., and Parmelee, R.  "Computing in Higher
Education: The Athena Experience". _Communications of the ACM 28_,
11 (Nov. 1985).

5. Cheriton, D. "The V Kernel: A Software Base for Distributed Systems".
_IEEE Software 1_, 2 (April 1984).

9. Gosling, J. and Rosenthal, D. A Window-Manager for Bitmapped Displays and
Unix. In _Methodology of Window-Managers_, F.R.A. Hopgood et al, Eds., 
Springer-Verlag, 1986.

10. Hawley, M. J., and Leffler, S. J. Windows for Unix at Lucasfilm.
Summer Conference Proceedings, Portland, USENIX Association, 1985.

12. Lantz, K.A. and Nowicki, W.I. "Structured Graphics for Distributed
Systems". _ACM Transactions on Graphics 3_, 1 (Jan. 1984).

13. Levy, H.  "VAXstation: A General-Purpose Raster Graphics Architecture".
_ACM Transactions on Graphics 3_, 1 (Jan. 1984).

14. Lipkie, D.E., Evans, S.R., Newlin, J.K., and Weissman, R.L. "Star Graphics:
An Object-Oriented Implementation."  _Computer Graphics 16_, 3 (July 1982).

15. Liskov, B. and Scheifler, R.  "Guardians and Actions: Linquistic
Support for Robust, Distributed Programs".  _ACM Transactions on
Programming Languages and Systems 5_, 3 (July 1983).

17. _Microsoft Windows: Programmer's Guide_.  Microsoft Corporation, 1985.

19. Morris, J., et atl. "Andrew: A Distributed Personal Computing Environment".
_Communications of the ACM 29_, 3 (March 1986).

21. Nowicki, W. _Partitioning of Function in a Distributed Graphics System_.
Ph.D. Th., Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1985.

23. Postel, J. Transmission Control Protocol. RFC 793, USC/Information
Sciences Institute, Sept. 1981.

27. Stallman, R., Moon, D., and Weinreb, D.  Lisp Machine Window System
Manual.  MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Aug., 1983.

30. _Programmer's Reference Manual for SunWindows_.  Sun Microsystems, Inc.,
1985.

31. Sweet, R. "Mesa Programming Environment". _ACM SIGPLAN Notices 20_, 7
(July 1985).

32. Sweetman, D. A Modular Window System for Unix.  In _Methodology of
Window-Managers_, F.R.A. Hopgood et al, Eds., Springer-Verlag, 1986.

33. _Programming the User Interface_. Symbolics, Inc., 1986.

34. Teitelman, W. The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and
Examination. CSL-83-11, Xerox PARC, June, 1984.

35. Trammel, R.D. A Capability Based Hierarchic Architecture for Unix Window
Management.  Summer Conference Proceedings, Portland, USENIX Association, 1985. 


two other references, not mentioned in the above text, that are worth noting:

11. _Information Processing: Graphical Kernel System (GKS) - Functional
Description_. DIS 7942, International Standards Organization, 1982.

22. Pike, R. "The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal". _AT&T Bell
Laboratories Technical Journal 63_, 8 (Oct. 1984).

[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20021010062505.GL87617 at wantadilla.lemis.com>
            "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at lemis.com> writes:
: > Or operating systems whose ancestry was indeed UNIX? I know that
: > with Linux, for example started carrying one, about the same time
: > the kernel became capable of supporting it. Or at least that's my
: > opinion. With regard to the materials we discuss here, well, that's
: > what I am attempting to ascertain.
: 
: If by "GUI" you mean a windowing system, and by "standard" you mean
: generally available, then I'd say the late 80s.  I started using X11R3
: on Interactive UNIX/386 in early 1990.  I'm sure I didn't count as an
: "early adopter".

I was using X10R4 on a Sun3/50 in 1987 or so.  I more commonly used
sunview in a similar time frame.  Sunview/OpenWindows has been
standard on Sun machines since that time.  It was surprising snappy
for a 50MHz 68k machine, so long as you didn't swap, but I digress.
There were similar offerings from DEC and I think HP in approximately
the same time frame.

It depends on what you mean by GUI I guess :-)

Warner

[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 10 October 2002 at  1:23:30 -0400, Gregg C Levine wrote:
> Hello from Gregg C Levine
> Cross posted to both TUH, and PUPS lists, apologies to all.
> Can someone advise me regarding when the GUIs became a standard feature on
> UNIX?

Well, there are three variables.  GUI, standard and UNIX.

> Or operating systems whose ancestry was indeed UNIX? I know that
> with Linux, for example started carrying one, about the same time
> the kernel became capable of supporting it. Or at least that's my
> opinion. With regard to the materials we discuss here, well, that's
> what I am attempting to ascertain.

If by "GUI" you mean a windowing system, and by "standard" you mean
generally available, then I'd say the late 80s.  I started using X11R3
on Interactive UNIX/386 in early 1990.  I'm sure I didn't count as an
"early adopter".

Greg
--
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key
See complete headers for address and phone numbers

[TUHS] Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX

[Gregg C Levine]

Hello from Gregg C Levine
Cross posted to both TUH, and PUPS lists, apologies to all.
Can someone advise me regarding when the GUIs became a standard feature on
UNIX? Or operating systems whose ancestry was indeed UNIX? I know that with
Linux, for example started carrying one, about the same time the kernel
became capable of supporting it. Or at least that's my opinion. With regard
to the materials we discuss here, well, that's what I am attempting to
ascertain.
Gregg C Levine drwho8 at worldnet.att.net
"Oh my!" The Second Doctor's nearly favorite phrase.