From: rnewman@thecia.net (Ron Newman) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: MIT Project Athena and CMU Andrew (was Re: What does AT stand for ?) Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 22:58:10 -0500 Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com Lines: 43 Message-ID: References: <87p3h0$m2f$1@bcarh8ab.ca.nortel.com> <87pb44$nvg$1@flood.weeg.uiowa.edu> <87q36h01i7p@news2.newsguy.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: p-256.newsdawg.com X-Newsreader: MT-NewsWatcher 2.4.4 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!newsfeed-zh.ip-plus.net!news.ip-plus.net!News.Amsterdam.UnisourceCS!skynet.be!newsfeed.stanford.edu!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!pln-w!spln!extra.newsguy.com!newsp.newsguy.com!rnewman Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:49546 In article <87q36h01i7p@news2.newsguy.com>, michael.wojcik@merant.com wrote: > Andrew (named after Carnegie and Mellon, of course) was a bizarre > collection of stuff. There was a whole suite of X Window applets > that were actually one giant binary with more than a dozen links - > its function was selected by argv[0], the name you ran it under - > presumably to avoid duplication of code and keep things resident, > since the OS didn't have shared libraries. Andrew came with the > Cambridge Window Manager, also written by ACIS, which was a tiling > (non-overlapping) X window manager, the only one I've ever seen. Andrew originally had its own home-grown window system, and tiling was integral to its user interface. Somewhere around 1986, the folks at CMU's Andrew and MIT's Athena projects each realized that they had something that the other project wanted. Andrew's window system had much better font and text handling than MIT's X Version 10, but X10 had much better support for graphics. So MIT agreed to produce a new version of its window system, X11, which would satisfy CMU's needs. CMU insisted that X11 have the ability to support a tiling window manager, and many of its inter-client communication features were designed to support that explicit goal. > It did include the Andrew File System, though, which was (and is) > a dramatic improvement over NFS (which isn't saying much). In return for X11, CMU gave MIT the Andrew File System. MIT's distributed architecture was seriously straining the capabilities of Sun NFS, and we desperately needed something better. AFS was it. > Andrew was CMU's answer to Project Athena, more or less. Much of > Athena disappeared into obscurity too (anyone here use Zephyr?), I've often wondered why Zephyr never made the big time. To a first order approximation, Zephyr is IRC. But I don't think anyone ever realized this, or built a gateway to internetwork the two different messaging protocols. -- Ron Newman rnewman@thecia.net http://www2.thecia.net/users/rnewman/ ###### From: michael.wojcik@merant.com (Michael Wojcik) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: MIT Project Athena and CMU Andrew (was Re: What does AT stand for ?) Date: 9 Feb 2000 21:22:38 GMT Organization: MERANT Inc. Lines: 56 Message-ID: <87slqu0fpj@news2.newsguy.com> References: <87p3h0$m2f$1@bcarh8ab.ca.nortel.com> <87pb44$nvg$1@flood.weeg.uiowa.edu> <87q36h01i7p@news2.newsguy.com> Reply-To: michael.wojcik@merant.com NNTP-Posting-Host: p-269.newsdawg.com X-Newsreader: xrn 9.00 Originator: mww@lorelei-n Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!newsfeed-zh.ip-plus.net!news.ip-plus.net!News.Amsterdam.UnisourceCS!skynet.be!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!news-FFM2.ecrc.net!newsfeed.enteract.com!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!pln-w!spln!extra.newsguy.com!newsp.newsguy.com!mww Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:49570 In article , rnewman@thecia.net (Ron Newman) writes: > In article <87q36h01i7p@news2.newsguy.com>, michael.wojcik@merant.com wrote: > > > [re CMU's Andrew] > Andrew originally had its own home-grown window system, and tiling > was integral to its user interface. [...] Fascinating. When I came to ACIS / TCS, X11 was just coming out, and ACIS' Andrew-related work (CWM, etc.) had just been completed, so I only heard bits and pieces of the history. Thanks for the info. > > It did include the Andrew File System, though, which was (and is) > > a dramatic improvement over NFS (which isn't saying much). > In return for X11, CMU gave MIT the Andrew File System. MIT's > distributed architecture was seriously straining the capabilities > of Sun NFS, and we desperately needed something better. AFS was it. TCS switched to AFS around the same time. It was a vast improvement over NFS, and I still miss it. (I'd implement it on my machines, but I can't make the business case for it, since NFS is good enough.) > > Andrew was CMU's answer to Project Athena, more or less. Much of > > Athena disappeared into obscurity too (anyone here use Zephyr?), > I've often wondered why Zephyr never made the big time. To a first > order approximation, Zephyr is IRC. But I don't think anyone ever > realized this, or built a gateway to internetwork the two different > messaging protocols. Zephyr's clearly an early version of those "instant messenger" things that are popular these days, too. But they seem to be more popular with casual users, who are much more likely to be interested in a download-and-run package than in something that comes in source code. Personally, I hate real-time computer messaging. I'm not fond of the telephone either, except for limited applications; I'd much rather use a store-and-forward, polled system that lets me manage my own time. (I want my OSes preemptively multitasked and myself coopera- tively multitasked.) But some people like them. I wish Kerberos had achieved better market penetration. There were flaws in Kerberos 4 and IIRC some potential weaknesses were found in K5 as well, but nothing like the gaping holes in Microsoft's first several stabs at distributed security. -- Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@merant.com AAI Development, MERANT (block capitals are a company mandate) Department of English, Miami University Ten or ten thousand, does it much signify, Helen, how we date fantasmal events, London or Troy? -- Basil Bunting