ITC window manager available (Andrew system)

[David Nichols]

                      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 at 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.