27 Jun
2024
27 Jun
'24
10:12 a.m.
On 27/06/24 09:20, Alan Coopersmith via TUHS wrote:
On 6/26/24 13:29, Marc Rochkind wrote:
I know. I attempted to use olvm on a 4MB 486, back in 1998 iirc. It was
not a success.
Wesley Parish
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 .