CMU Andrew system (and wm) preservation

Michael Kerpan mjkerpan at kerpan.com
Mon Sep 7 17:25:31 CDT 2020


AFS is also cool, but it's a separate project that's still actively
maintained and (presumably) used. The Andrew UI stuff is more firmly in the
realm of computer history. Honestly, I'm surprised that it didn't get more
traction early on Linux, given that it was included in some of the more
influential early distros and it included a more complete set of apps than
anything else that you could get for free at the time. That said, it's also
a shame that IBM wouldn't allow the native window manager to be released
like the rest of the system. It probably would have been a better fit for
PC hardware of the early to mid 90s than X11...

Mike

On Mon, Sep 7, 2020, 5:26 PM Zane Healy <healyzh at avanthar.com> wrote:

>
>
> > On Sep 7, 2020, at 2:04 PM, Don Stalkowski via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon Sep  7 15:29:51 2020 cctalk at classiccmp.org (Michael Kerpan via
> cctalk) wrote:
> >>
> >> Has anybody even been able to get the X-based version to build? I
> remember
> >> finding it on some Unix/Linux source code CD-ROM like 20 years ago,
> >> thinking it sounded useful and cool, and trying to build it on whatever
> >> Linux I was using on my hand-me-down 486 back in 1999/2000. Even back
> then,
> >> it didn't build for me.
> >>
> >> Mike
> >>
> >
> > The version that came with Yggdrasil Linux back in 1993 included
> > binaries ans source. That distro had 0.99.13 kernel, gcc-2.4.5, and
> > XFree86-1.2. So, it did build at one time.
>
> I want to say that it was included with SLS as well in ’92/93.  Really the
> main thing I remember about CMU Andrew was AFS.  I had to work with that
> from late ’96, until I think 2005.
>
> Zane
>
>
>


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