30 Jan
2023
30 Jan
'23
11:23 a.m.
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 12:20:52AM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote:
3. Next is the 1989 NeWS book that has a nice overview and history of windowing systems
in its chapter 3:
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf
Both the UK conference and the NeWS book mention a Unix kernel-based windowing system
done at MIT in 1981 or 1982, “NU" or “NUnix”, by Jack Test. That one had not been
mentioned before here and may have been the first graphical windowing work on Unix,
preceding the Blit. Who remembers this one?
mentioned in ;login: Volume 7 Number 4, September 1982
https://archive.org/details/login_september-1982/page/24/mode/2up
Notes on the Boston USENIX and /usr/group Joint Meeting July 1982
"NUnix Window System Description
Jack A. Test
Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Room 414, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, Mass 02139
The NUnix Window System is a set of software that provides a user a
basic window management mechanism on a high resolution display.
It was developed for use with the MIT Real Time Systems Group NU
Personal Computer, a 68000-based machine which uses a 820x1024 point
raster-scan display, keyboard, and mouse for the user interface.
The NU machines are being used for developing a multi-font editing
system and drawing facility, in several circuit design projects,
and in the development of new operating system concepts.
The user may create multiple overlapping rectangular windows on the
display. Each is associated with an independent UNIX teletype device
and a display device. A window may have up to eight independent and
changeable font maps. The windows are controlled with ioctl calls
and special signals. These allow such actions as creating a new
window, drawing on it, selecting or changing the fonts associated
with it, reading the state of the mouse, obtaining and/or changing
the state of the window, etc. Each window belongs to a process-group
to which a signal is sent whenever there is a change to the attributes
of the window. There is a window-manager program which makes use
of the mouse device to allow the user to select functions from a set of
displayed menus. The user also has access to the display bitmap and a
special graphics routine library.
The NUnix Window System is implemented in a set of device-driver
routines in the UNIX V7 kernel. Most of the window driver code is
machine independent with the exception of two low-level routines
for driving the raster display and keyboard devices respectively.
The NUnix Window System provides a basic window management mechanism
that: (1) is transparent to the vast majority of user programs, (2)
provides a clean user interface without the addition of any new
system calls, and (3) allows user processes to manage their windows
independently and with minimal kernel-imposed limitations.
The code for the NUnix Window System is available from MIT if you
have a UNIX V7 license. The speaker has submitted a paper for the
Conference Proceedings."
goes on to briefly cover:
Design of an Intelligent Bitmap Terminal
Rich Fortier and Tony Lake
Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., 10 Moulton St., Cambridge, Mass 02238
The SUN Workstation
Andreas Bechtolsheim
Sun Microsystems, 2310 Walsh Ave., Sania Clara, CA 95051
Merging Bitmap Graphics and UNIX
Rob Pike
Bell Labs 2C-521, Murray Hill, NJ 07974
a different writeup of these is in:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V04.5.pdf
September 1982, Vol IV No V
July Usenix Abstracts