The History of the Common Desktop Environment

But you can't tell the proper history without talking about X, OPEN LOOK, Motif and lots of other tech! So we travel back to the late 60's to begin the retelling.

From Season 4, Episode 6 "Anything But Common"

⭐⭐⭐⭐Producers ❤️
John Andersen, Bruno Parisi, Johnny, Dave Jones
⭐⭐⭐Co-Producers ❤️
Tim LePés
⭐⭐Super Users ❤️
Nicholas Omann, CubicleNate, sleepyeyesvince, LiNuXsys666, Jill Bryant & Steve Ryniker, Paul Burton, Eduardo Sanchez, Advait, Musical Coder, Larry Murphy, Hausken, Livet, Nick Woody, Mark aka The Saigoneer, Tobias Niedermayr
⭐Users ❤️
Eduardo PH, Kyle, Jon Guthery, Eduard Lucena

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The History of The Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
The Andrew Project
W was a windowing system that was originally written for the V operating system
In 1984, Robert Scheifler wrote
X is our “reaction” to W
Ultrix Window Manager, or uwm
Tom's Window Manager, which eventually became Tab Window Manager, or twm
Open Look Specification
The OSF narrows the search for a User Interface
HP and Microsoft's CXI and DEC's XUI to create the HP OSF/Motif Window Manager
Sun went on to build OpenWindows, which was X with OPEN LOOK on top to replace SunView.
COSE
In 1994, The OSF and Unix International, a body meant to standardize UNIX, merged
and in 96, merged again with X/Open into The Open Group
Motif and CDE became one
KDE enters the scene
May of 2000 when Motif was released as OpenMotif
LessTif, because Less is Mo, published an initial statement
August 6th, 2012, CDE was relicensed under the LGPL and was available on SourceForge, where it still lives today
After opening it up, 2.2.1 was released on March 1st, 2014
The final release, at least as of this recording, 2.5.1, dropped in October of 2022

#Linux #Unix #History #CommonDesktopEnvironment #KDE #Gnome #DesktopEnvironment #Motif #MOoLit #LessTif

[ChrisGuiver]

Thanks guys. Another interesting show.

I recall CDE, though working in banking almost everything I used was big blue (and s390/s38/as400 and not aix) and I don't really recall where I saw CDE. I don't think it was at work.

[tschak]

It's kind of important to understand:

The VS100 was a bizarre stop-gap machine. It happened, because DEC's VLSI based MicroVAX wasn't ready yet, so the solution was to make a very powerful graphics terminal that connected to a host VAX machine (e.g. an 11/780, 785, or even a 735) via fibre optic cabling to a UNIBUS host card. The terminal itself was 68000 based, with 256K of RAM on it which formed not only the framebuffer and backing store, but also could locally execute some pieces of code. The standard windowing system for it escapes me, which ran under VMS, but LCS used it under 4.2BSD UNIX.

[tschak]

and I can also tell you that COSE was supposed to be pronounced similar to "cozy"