[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com>]

On 27/06/24 09:20, Alan Coopersmith via TUHS wrote:
> On 6/26/24 13:29, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>> The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten 
>> (I hope) GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember 
>> DEC, HP, and IBM, among others) supporting an X Window System GUI 
>> toolkit called Motif battled Sun and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. 
>> OpenLook was about 50 times more elegant, but Motif won the day. It 
>> came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which was easily the most 
>> arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they were disbanded 
>> as a result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or 
>> monopolistic behavior, or a cartel, or something along those lines.
>
> OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group, though the lawsuit 
> you mention
> is described in the History section of
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation .
>
>> I think the Motif folks managed at one point to get their own 
>> standards committee. I know that our effort fizzled. I don't know if 
>> there ever was a Motif standard.
>
> After the merger, Motif was included, along with CDE and the X Window 
> System,
> as part of The Open Group's "Unix 98 Workstation" standard.  Later 
> versions
> of the Unix standards dropped the GUI components altogether.
>
>> Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad 
>> student. OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation 
>> programmers, but I don't know if it ever appeared on any other system.
>
> At least the Xview library and olvm window manager were released as 
> open source,
> and were available on some early Linux distros.  Some other 
> applications are
> still available from either https://www.darwinsys.com/olcd/ or
> https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM .
>
I know. I attempted to use olvm on a 4MB 486, back in 1998 iirc. It was 
not a success.

Wesley Parish