On Sun, Sep 06, 2020 at 12:21:56PM -0700, Chris Hanson via cctalk wrote: > Back before X11 took off, IBM funded CMU's development of Andrew, which had > its own complete window system represented by its "wm" window manager. One of > the many things that led to X's prevalence was that to get ahold of Andrew > and wm, you had to license it from IBM, whereas X was licensed freely by MIT > and available via FTP, tape, etc. > > When I was at CMU in the early through mid 1990s, the CMU Computer Club > continued to maintain a fork of "wm" called "wmc" that was available to club > members, including source code. While I'm pretty sure I have an archive of > this code on a Zip disk somewhere, I thought I'd put out the call to the > community to see if anyone else had preserved early Andrew bits since they're > both historically important and architecturally interesting. > > What's architecturally interesting about them? Among other things, CMU > created their own shared library mechanism for Andrew, and their own object > oriented dialect of C (implemented via a separate preprocessor) that was > surprisingly similar to Objective-C. The entire Andrew system was also > component-oriented, such that it supported embedding components for handling > different media types within each other, while keeping the embedded ones > editable -- most of what developers got later with OLE and OpenDoc. > > So it'd be great if this stuff was archived in such a way that it could be > used with contemporary systems, whether emulated or real hardware. Has anyone > done any of this yet? > > -- Chris >
Forgive a dumb question, but is this somehow related to the Andrew Tool Kit or the Andrew User Interface System? don
