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Window Management Workshop

The main impetus for the Workshop on Window Management was from the Alvey Programme's Man-Machine Interface Director who was concerned at the lack of a formal definition of window management and the lack of a focus for research activities in this area. The task of the Workshop was to solve both problems. There were about 25 participants with Warren Teitelman, James Gosling, Brad Myers and other leading window management specialists in attendance. The Workshop took place from 29 April to 1 May 1985 at Cosener's House. The report of the Workshop was published by Springer-Verlag as Methodology of Window Management in January 1986. The five co-editors were Bob Hopgood, David Duce, Liz Fielding, Ken Robinson and Tony Williams, all from Informatics. Tony Williams presented a paper at the Workshop comparing several different window managers.

Tony Williams and a PERQ2, 1985

Tony Williams and a PERQ2, 1985
Full image ⇗
© UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council

The Workshop recommended a series of activities for the near future and longer-term research themes. One outcome of the Workshop was a request for a standard Application Program Interface to a range of window managers RAL coordinated the activities of the UK manufacturers towards agreeing such a standard. A Window Manager research proposal, originally submitted to SERC two years earlier, was funded by Alvey, initially for a Portable Window Manager.

Following several rounds of refinement of the specification, and comments by the participating manufacturers, a version was agreed and work commenced on the design of a window system to be implemented initially on the ICL PERQ and SUN workstations. This had two parts: (a) a low-level software interface (known as the Client-Server Interface or CSI) to window management functions implementab1e on a range of workstations, and (b) implementation of the CSI on selected workstations as an existence proof. With vendor support for the CSI, application toolkits such as WW, which before required extensive work to port to new environments became much more widely available, easing greatly the work of applications programmers. Phase (a) was completed early in 1987 (RAL Report 87-017) The implementation on the PERQ was completed. The SUN implementation was slightly later waiting for the arrival of X version 11.

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