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64 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
64 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
= The OPEN LOOK and XView CD-ROM (Archived)
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Lifetimes ago, I wrote a book for O'Reilly Media called
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_X Windows User Guide, Volume 3: OPEN LOOK Edition_.
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For those unfamiliar with the history, OPEN LOOK was a very good
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UI specification, of which there were three different implementations:
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. NeWS, the Network Extensible Window System (an entire window system
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written in PostScript), originated by James Gosling
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at Sun (same James Gosling who later invented the Java language);
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. OLIT, AT&T's OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit, based on the Unix Xt Toolkit;
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. XView, by Sun Microsystems, using XLib and based on the programing paradigm
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of their earlier SunView toolkit.
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Of these three, to my knowledge only XView was ever released
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in source form, certainly so at the time.
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Gosling once told me that NeWS had too many components from too
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many other software vendors for them ever to open source it.
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Unfortunately, at the time I completed writing this book,
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Sun Microsystems pulled the plug on OPEN LOOK,
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caving to Motif and effectively ending the "Unix UI Wars"
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in return for getting a bunch of their stuff included into the
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Common Desktop Environment (CDE).
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In the aftermath of O'Reilly's decision not to publish the book,
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I made it available on CD-ROM.
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You can read the original README file from the CD-ROM in the file
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README-orig.txt in this directory.
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We mostly sold the CD-ROM through Amazon,
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making me one of the few hundred earliest Amazon sellers
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other than major publishers.
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In all we sold a few hundred copies over several years.
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At this time, it seemed that Bruce Tognozzini's (of _Tog on Interface_ fame)
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wish that OPEN LOOK "be towed out to sea and given a decent burial"
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had come true, and so I abandoned sales and put the CD-ROM up
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for FTP download as an ISO image.
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After several changes of server and server software, this
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arrangement fell apart.
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So now I am putting what's left of it up on GitHub
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for anyone to pick over the remains. This was created by reading
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an early CVS archive I made at the time, merged with some additional
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files in a file I found on my hard drive called "olcd.tar" and
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a few from one of my last remaining copies of the CD.
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That's why some of the GIT log dates are from 2001 and some from 2016.
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== Caveat Lector: Some files are missing.
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First, I've removed all binary programs and libs, since what worked on
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Linux or Solaris in the mid-1990's just isn't going to be useful today.
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Ditto for the search index, which had been built for a proprietary
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indexing program.
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Second, this repository is cobbled together from sources as
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described above, so there is no guarantee that it
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is exactly the same as what was on the CD.
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As well, there were a few minor revisions to the CD as we found
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minor glitches, so there isn't even a single set of "what was on the CD".
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If you find any of the missing files, well, this is GitHub,
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so clone the repo and send a pull request.
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Or, for individual files, you could just email them to me.
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