Andrew Window System

[James Peterson]

      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 at cmu-cs-pt.arpa

or

Distribution Coordinator
Information Technology Center
Carnegie-Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213
(412)-578-6700