[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>]

On Jan 26, 2023, at 2:17 PM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Bakul Shah bakul at iitbombay.org 
>> Fri Jan 27 05:39:30 AEST 2023
>> 
>> I wonder if this mythical w is the same as V's VGTS as it seems to have
>> pretty much the same model.
>> From https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/357332.357334
> 
> 
> That is an interesting thought and paper.
> 
> The paper says:
> 
> "As noted in Section 3, the VGTS is only one component of the user interface software. The other components are the view manager, the exec server, and the executives. Together, the view manager and exec server constitute the user interface management.”
> 
> In this context an “executive” seems to be similar to a shell, the exec server appears to manage client connections and the view manager seems to be similar to a window manager in X. Maybe this whole was (later?) referred to as “W”?

For the curious the sources are available at http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/Stanford/VSystem_1983.zip

It just seems weird that
a) for a research OS such as V there were more than one such effort but
b) there are no papers about W or any mention of it in V related papers.
c) there is source code for VGTS as well as at least one paper about it.
d) VGTS seems to have had similar goals as X windows.
e) there seemed to be multiple applications written using VGTS.

I didn't spend much time searching so may have missed things. I have
asked a friend who had Cheriton as research advisor in '80s but most
likely it won't yield anything.