ManaGeR - The forgotten UNIX Window System of the 1980s

Date:
Mon, 08 Aug 2022 13:00:39 GMT

Description:
Lightweight, open source, and portable -- with versions for Mac, Atari, and a whole slew of UNIX's.

FULL STORY ======================================================================

In 1984 a windowing system was created for UNIX.

And, no. Im not talking about X Windows (which was also created in 1984, as
a heavily modified fork of W ).

No, sir-e-bot! Im talking about MGR .

Say what, now? you ask. MGWhat? Never heard of it.

M. G. R.

Buckle up. Because this little windows system is pretty darn interesting.

Behold!

MGR was developed by Stephen A. Uhler in 1984, while working at Bellcore, for SunOS (Sun UNIX Workstations).

Stephen described MGR in a paper which he published entitled Architecture
and Design of the MGR Window System .:

MGR is a window system for UNIX , currently running on a Sun Workstation.
MGR features overlapped, asynchronous windows, and an applications interface that is both machine and network independent. All existing Unix applications can run unchanged under MGR, either on a local, or a remote host.

Ok. Thats a bit stiff. In essence it means this: MGR is a window system. Like X Windows. But not at all X Windows.

Now, before we go too much further, we should discuss how to pronounce MGR.

Initially, it was pronounced munger by those at Bellcore. Users of the system commonly pronounced each letter separately M-G-R. Occasionally it is referred to as the Bellcore Window Manager or Bellcore MGR (being as it was developed at Bellcore).

But, ultimately, the common pronunciation settled on Manager by those outside of Bellcore.

Editors note: I like Munger, personally. If not Munger, I would tend
towoards the Bellcore MGR name. But Ill defer to the popular consensus on this one. MGR MGR everywhere !

One of the neat things about MGR is that it was designed to be highly portable. Consisting of two components a smaller component that handled interaction with the hardware (mouse, framebuffer, etc.), and the larger component which handled everything else (and was completely hardware and device independent). This resulted in being able to port MGR to the Mac Plus in two weeks.

MGR was designed to be portable to a variety of computer systems. To date it runs on Sun Workstations (monochrome and color), Apple Macintoshes and UNIX System V based Dune 2 distributed computers.

In fact, according to later documentation , the number of systems running MGR had absolutely exploded:

MGR currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Sun 3/4 workstations with SunOS, and Coherent. Various older versions of MGR run on the Macintosh, Atari ST MiNT, Xenix, 386-Minix, DEC 3100, and the 3b1 Unix-pc. Many small, industrial, real-time systems under OS9 or Lynx in Europe use (another variant of) Mgr
for their user interface. The programming interface is implemented in C and
in ELisp, although supporting clients written in other languages is quite easy.

Atari ST! Xenix! Minix! Linux!

Absolutely wild how many systems received a port of MGR many in commercial use and yet the system has almost entirely fallen out of our common
knowledge with a surprising lack of builds and screenshots available for MGR running on most of these systems.

Luckily we do have some screenshots of MGR running on top of Coherent (a UNIX clone for IBM compatible PCs of the 1980s). The Bellcore MGR loading screen.

Just as a side note: I love that MGR from Bellcore had a loading screen. I kinda miss those.

A very familiar look. This is a simple MGR display with a terminal window.

Another interesting tidbit mentioned in this documentation

Running MGR requires much less in resources than X, or even gcc. It does not have the user-base, software repertory, or high-level libraries of X or MS-Windows, say, but it is quite elegant and approachable.

This general sentiment that MGR was sometimes preferable to X due to its lightweight nature was a not un-common one in the 1980s (and into the very early 1990s). Some opted to use the resource-light MGR over the likes of SunView and X Windows .

Which I get. If any of you were using X during the late 1980s yikes. Even
on moderately powerful machines of the time, X could be downright pokey! It went open source!

And the whole gosh darned thing was released as open source in January of
1989 on the USENET comp.sources.unix newsgroup . It was, at the time of its posting, the single largest source code post of its kind to
comp.sources.unix.

While no specific license is included with the sourse code release, a copyright notice is included at the top of many of the files which tends to read like this (with varying years posted at the top): #
Copyright (c) 1988 Bellcore
# All Rights Reserved
# Permission is granted to copy or use this program, EXCEPT that it
# may not be sold for profit, the copyright notice must be reproduced
# on copies, and credit should be given to Bellcore where it is due.
# BELLCORE MAKES NO WARRANTY AND ACCEPTS NO LIABILITY FOR THIS PROGRAM.

Permission is granted! Good enough! Thats open source to me!

The full source code is available from Stephen Uhlers website as a single archive and Hack.org has also made available a few source and binary snapshots .

Will MGR see a resurgence in popularity nowadays? Considering how beefy most machines are nowadays, it doesnt seem likely.

Still, it is somewhat sad that MGR doesnt get talked about more. It deserves to be remembered. It has an important place in mid to late 1980s computing.

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Link to news story: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/manager-the-forgotten-unix-window


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