swm

Tom LaStrange had already written twm when he joined Solbourne Computer, a maker of SPARC-compatible workstations. There he built swm, the Solbourne Window Manager, around an idea that was new to Unix: a desktop larger than the screen, with a panner showing the whole thing in miniature.

swm was commercial and shipped with Solbourne hardware, so few people ever ran it. The idea spread instead through tvtwm, which LaStrange grafted onto twm himself. One trace of the origin stuck: the virtual root is tagged with the property __SWM_VROOT, and screensavers and wallpaper tools hunting for the real root window still look for exactly that name.