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DECwindows

Infra & Ops På svenska → Updated: 2026-10-07

DEC's graphical environment for VMS and Ultrix, one of the first commercial desktops built on X11.

DEC had helped fund Project Athena and bet on X early. DECwindows arrived in the late 1980s for both VMS and Ultrix, with a session manager, a window manager and bundled applications such as a calendar and file manager. Its toolkit was XUI, the X User Interface, built on Xt.

When the Open Software Foundation set out to produce a common toolkit, DEC contributed XUI, which together with HP's widgets became the basis of Motif — the UIL description language came along the same route. DEC then switched to Motif itself and sold the result as DECwindows Motif, a name that outlived both DEC and Compaq and still ships on OpenVMS.

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