HP/DEC/Compaq

I've interest in looking at the source code to the Ultrix WM and possibly attempting to build and run it. I have confirmed it was at one point released under a BSD-ish license, so legally there should be no strings. Google failed to find it after the first ten or so pages of results, so I'm pretty stumped.

wasn't this called XUI for DECWindows?

isn't this the same uwm that was the default window manager prior to X11R4? why can't you just download it from x.org?

Wikipedia wrote: The Ultrix Window Manager (uwm) was the standard window manager for the X Window System from X11R1 through X11R3 releases. In fact, it was the only X11-compatible window manager as of X11R1.

Wikipedia page here (it's pretty short). Which includes this link to the sources: http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/project/windowmanagers/dev/uwm/

If you are in fact looking for/needs DECwindows source, I don't believe I know where to lay hands on that.

Well, thanks SMJ for a link to the source so I could take a crack at building. Unfortunately it didn't work, not that I expected a miracle or anything. Oh well.

It's possible those were "Athenized" sources - you could dig around for a clean X11R4 tarball if you really wanted to experience uwm.

Link to split tapes: http://www.x.org/releases/X11R4/

It was more of just curiousity than anything else, and looking at the code gave me an idea of how those old WMs work. Just wish I could find a non-GPL WM I like

I just spent two months in the X11R2, X11R3, and X11R4 source. the uwm code isn't included with R4 (maaaaaaybe in contrib/, I didn't spend a lot of time in that part). the source from x.org is the straight release, it's not "athenaized" unless the official distribution was. R3 builds and runs (except the server binary---oy, compiler bugs) on RT 4.3BSD, so there's nothing wrong with the source.

All I'd be after would be a patch for uwm to compile on FreeBSD - I know C but not enough to dabble in a 20+ year old makefile and source code and make changes.

TeamBlackFox wrote: I know C but not enough to dabble in a 20+ year old makefile and source code and make changes.

the age doesn't matter. many things were actually easier. if you can handle c and makefiles today you'll have no problems dealing with older stuff

I'll keep a copy of the source as a project. Maybe I will rewrite it into my own WM one day or something.

kjaer wrote: the source from x.org is the straight release, it's not "athenaized" unless the official distribution was.

Right, that's why I included a link to it - versus the link I'd posted earlier, which was to something that looks an awful lot like an old Athena AFS locker at MIT...

Anyway - X11R2, R3 and R4 on ROMP, eh? How long did that R3 build take? Reminds me of setting up X11 builds to run over the weekend back in '89-91...

smj wrote: Anyway - X11R2, R3 and R4 on ROMP, eh? How long did that R3 build take? Reminds me of setting up X11 builds to run over the weekend back in '89-91...

R3 took something like 6 hours, then another 4 to run 'make install', because it keeps rebuilding everything (thanks for learning how to use make, guys). Despite RT BSD supposedly being a native target for R2, it didn't even build. This was apparently well known even in the day; you had to use the IBM distribution of R2 on the RT if you want it to, you know, actually work.

I came to X11 originally in the R4/R5 transition days, by which time X11 was pretty well sorted out. The exercise gave me a new appreciation for the complaints in the UHH which I'd always taken as exaggerated for comic effect, and made me remember that shitty software written by infinite monkeys isn't a new feature of the free software movement.

If anybody knows where to find a copy of the MIT contributed patches to Xibm server in the R3 distribution that used to be at ftp://expo.lcs.mit.edu/contrib/ibm-rt.r3-fixes.tar.Z which actually make the thing, well, work , I'd be beyond thrilled to hear about it. It'd be dated approximately May 25, 1989, and contain the server/ddx/ibm/ tree.

kjaer wrote: ... made me remember that shitty software written by infinite monkeys isn't a new feature of the free software movement.

But shouldn't things be getting better ? I mean, in the early days of railroads the steam locomotives used to explode regularly. Mississippi river boats blew up all the time. Airplanes fell out of the sky in pieces. But even back in the 1800's, long before computers, people figured out how to fix flaky crap and did it quickly.

Nowadays it seems to get worse and worse instead of better, e.g. look at foetz' recent experience with Seti. Every succeeding issue of gtk is stewpider than the previous one.

Why is this ?

Inconvenient software wasting time is a long way from boilers exploding and killing people. Things improve when people are of a mind to get together and improve them.

kjaer wrote: Things improve when people are of a mind to get together and improve them.

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.84.html#subj10

kjaer wrote: Inconvenient software wasting time is a long way from boilers exploding and killing people. Things improve when people are of a mind to get together and improve them.

things improve when one or more people have determined what improvement is. and that's the problem, the idea of what improvement is is very subjective

This talk explains why software has so far failed to develop an engineering culture:



I think he spends too little time on the subject of error recovery. There are, like he says, fairly mature systems and methodologies for verifying that programs are correct, which for some reason the industry isn't using. But there are notably fewer articles from academia about ways to make programs withstand the unexpected.