jlp@cmu-cs-h.ARPA (James Peterson) (05/03/85)
The Andrew System Release 1 - Description 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 consists of: 1. A window manager. The window manager 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 includes 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 configured in. Porting wm to other displays should be farily easy, developing the existing drivers took 4-6 weeks each. 2. Many client programs. The client programs supplied include: a. The edittext editor and its associated programs (edit, edittool, and StyleEditor). b. Other programs built using the user interface toolkit, such as typescript, and help. c. preview, which displays DVI troff output. d. h19 and telnet, based on a 24-by-80 emulator. e. fe, the font editor. f. clock, gvmstat, wdf, and other simple window manager clients. g. donz, dir, and lsh, which are experimental icon or menu interfaces to UNIX. 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 implements, 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 descriptions supplied with TEX, and are public-domain. Following discussions with IBM, it has been decided that CMU will distribute the Andrew system, developed at the Information Technology Center. This is experimental software, and is far from complete, but it has been in use for more than a year at the ITC. The software will be distributed in source form on an "as is" basis, with no committment from either CMU or IBM to support of any kind, or to future releases. CMU will levy a charge of $100 to cover distribution costs. The software is the property of IBM, and carrys IBM copyright. Recipients will be required to sign a license form, which allows use for research and educational purposes, and forbids re-distribution. Licenses will be granted to Universities, and to a limited number of non-University sites. To obtain a license, contact andrew%cmu-itc-linus@cmu-cs-pt.arpa or Distribution Coordinator Information Technology Center Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213 (412)-578-6700