Apollo Display Manager
More info
- Creator
- Apollo Computer
- Released
- 1981
- Type
- Window system
The window system of Apollo's workstations from 1981, three years ahead of X and the Macintosh, in which every window was a view onto a text buffer and the editor, the shell and the window management were one and the same program.
Apollo Computer was founded in 1980 by William Poduska and shipped the DN100 the following year: a networked workstation with a bitmapped display and a mouse, built around its own operating system, Aegis, later renamed Domain/OS. The Display Manager, DM, was its public face. The screen was divided into windows, and behind every window sat a pad, a scrollable text buffer that might be a file being edited, the output of a shell window or a menu. The same key commands edited all of them; copying out of a command window and pasting into a file was taken for granted a decade before other systems caught up.
DM was not a separate client but part of the operating system, so there was nothing to swap out and no policy debate to have. Nodes hung on Apollo's own token ring and could run diskless against a server on the network. When X11 arrived Apollo shipped an X server alongside DM, and after HP bought the company in 1989 the lineage fed into HP VUE. The pattern, one proprietary window system per vendor followed by surrender to X, would repeat at DEC, Sun and everyone else.