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  • [LINK] The MGR Window System (history)

    From Computer Nerd Kev@21:1/5 to All on Mon Aug 8 09:02:39 2022
    The MGR Window System
    - https://hack.org/mc/mgr/

    "MGR, sometimes said to be short for "ManaGeR", sometimes short for
    "Munger", is a simple network transparent window system. It was
    originally developed for the Sun 3 series of workstations by
    Stephen Uhler and colleagues beginning in 1984 while at Bellcore
    (later Telcordia, now part of Ericsson) and later enhanced by many
    others.

    The window system ran on many different hardware platforms, at
    least these: Sun 3/xx workstations running SunOS, which was the the
    original development platform, Sun SPARCstations (SunOS and then
    ported by me to Solaris), Intel x86 based PCs (Coherent, Minix,
    FreeBSD or Linux), Atari ST (under MiNT), AT&T UnixPC (SysV) and
    the Macintosh.

    The entire MGR source code was posted to Usenet in 1989,
    comp.sources.unix Volume 17, Issue 1. A lot of people picked it up.

    Personally I first got acquainted with MGR while using Sun 3/50 and
    3/60 workstations at the Lysator Academic Computing Society at
    Link?ping University in 1991.

    Many people at Lysator prefered MGR instead of using Sun's own
    SunView (nee SunTools) and, later, many still preferred MGR instead
    of running the X Window System. X, even on the high-end 3/80
    workstations we later had, was not a pleasant experience, probably
    mostly because of memory starvation. It wasn't until we had SPARC
    CPUs that most users started abandoning MGR." ...

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  • From Eli the Bearded@21:1/5 to Computer Nerd Kev on Tue Aug 9 01:56:58 2022
    In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
    The MGR Window System
    - https://hack.org/mc/mgr/

    "MGR, sometimes said to be short for "ManaGeR", sometimes short for
    "Munger", is a simple network transparent window system. It was
    originally developed for the Sun 3 series of workstations by Stephen
    Uhler and colleagues beginning in 1984 while at Bellcore (later
    Telcordia, now part of Ericsson) and later enhanced by many others.

    I remember it was included on the install CD of the first Linux I got
    for myself. Red Hat Linux (not Red Hat Enterprise) somewhere in the 2.0
    to 5.0 range. I remember installing and playing with it for a few days,
    but it was monochrome. I also don't think any web browsers supported it,
    so you were stuck with Lynx.

    Elijah
    ------
    used A/UX prior to Linux

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