nichols@cmu-cs-h.ARPA (David Nichols) (04/09/85)
The Andrew System Release 1 - Description Introduction Following discussions with IBM, it has been decided that C-MU will distribute the Andrew system, developed at the Information Technology Center to support the user interface of campus applications. This is experimental software, and is far from complete, but it has been in use for more than a year at the ITC. The ITC expects to continue development of this software, and may release future versions. The software will be distributed in source form on an ``as is'' basis, with no committment from either C-MU or IBM to support of any kind, or to future releases. C-MU will levy a charge of $100 to cover distribution costs. The software is the property of IBM, and will carry IBM copyright. Recipients will be required to sign a license form, which will allow use for research and educational purposes, and will forbid re-distribution. Licenses will be granted to Universities, and to a lim- ited number of non-University sites. C-MU expects to be able to ship tapes early in February 1985. To obtain a license, contact: Distribution Coordinator Information Technology Center Carnegie-Mellon University Schenley Park Pittsburgh PA 15213 (412)-578-6700 The Andrew system has been in normal use at the ITC for many months on a network that now includes about 60 Sun 100U and 120 workstations and several VAXen. It con- sists of: 1. A window manager, which runs as a user-level process on an un-modified Sun 4.2BSD kernel and drives either the Model 1 or Model 2 monochrome displays, or the Model 1 color display. 2. Many client programs, including editors, shells, clocks, performance monitors, and so on. These communicate with the window manager using TCP/IP stream sockets, and should run on any 4.2BSD system; they are known to run on both Suns and VAXen. 3. A user interface toolkit, used to build many of the clients, that may be used to construct further clients with a compatible user interface. It im- plements, among other objects, dynamically re- formatted multi-font, multi-size, proportionally spaced text, with cut-and-paste between windows. Programs using these facilities may generate output to be printed via either the troff or Scribe text formatters. 4. A large collection of display fonts, including Roman, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic in Serif, San- Serif and Typewriter styles and sizes from 6 to 36 points. These are derived from Metafont descrip- tions supplied with TEX, and are public-domain. These programs are in the process of development, and must be regarded as experimental. We would be glad to accept any comments or suggestions for improvements (please mail them to andrew%cmu-itc-linus@cmu-cs- pt.arpa), but the software is supplied as-is and there is no support of any kind. The Window Manager The window manager wm is a program that runs as a user- level process on a workstation, and makes windows on the display available as a network service. Clients make remote procedure calls over TCP/IP stream sockets to perform operations on windows. As supplied, wm in- cludes drivers for the Sun 1 monochrome and color displays, and the Sun 2 monochrome display. They use no support from the kernel except the ability to mmap() the display; the Sun windows support need not be con- figured in. With the exceptions noted below, no kernel modifications are needed. Porting wm to other displays should be farily easy, developing the existing drivers took 4-6 weeks each. Two libraries are supplied to allow you to write new wm clients. The source is in directories libwm and wm- pascal. The Client Programs The client programs supplied include: 1. The edittext (sometimes called xyzzy) editor and its associated programs (edit, edittool, and StyleEditor). 2. Other programs built using the user interface toolkit, such as typescript, and help. 3. preview, which displays DVI troff output. 4. h19 and telnet, based on a 24-by-80 emulator. 5. fe, the font editor. 6. clock, gvmstat, wdf, and other simple window manager clients. 7. donz, dir, and lsh, which are experimental icon or menu interfaces to UNIX. Also included is TrmWM.c, a driver for Gosling's EMACS that interfaces directly to wm. All existing Unix pro- grams (including full screen editors such as vi) can be run under the h19 or telnet terminal emulators. The programs based on the toolkit typically have a print option. This generates output for troff, but could be changed to generate output for Scribe. The Fonts The fonts are public-domain and derived from Metafont. They require some hand-tuning to cover deficiencies in the resolution reduction process. A font editor is sup- plied, and the ITC would be grateful if you would send us any fonts you do tune for possible inclusion in fu- ture distributions. Documentation We supply manual pages for the programs and libraries, programmers guides for the window manager and the user interface toolkit, and a tutorial introduction to the system. The documentation has been prepared with the entire ITC system in mind. We are, at this time, releasing only a small part of the system. You will need to ignore those portions of the documentation dealing with parts of the system which are not being released (such as the file system, mail/bboards, and some printing software). This software is still very much under development and may be released in the future.
schoff@cadtroy.UUCP (Martin Lee Schoffstall) (04/14/85)
Is this the infamous "tiling" window manager???? marty