X.desktop
More info
- Creator
- IXI Limited
- Released
- Type
- Desktop environment
- License
- Proprietary
IXI's file manager and desktop for X11 from 1988, the first commercial attempt to give Unix icons and a wastebasket, and the foundation under SCO's Open Desktop.
IXI was founded in Cambridge in 1987 by Ray Anderson on the premise that Unix needed a Macintosh-style desktop, and X.desktop arrived the following year: icons for files and programs, directories as windows, drag and drop, a wastebasket and a rules file that decided which icon a file got and what a double-click did. It all sat on top of X11 and soon took on a Motif look. Since IXI did not sell computers it licensed to those who did, and X.desktop turned up under its own name at a dozen Unix vendors.
The biggest customer was SCO, which made it the core of Open Desktop in 1990 and bought all of IXI in 1993. As SCO's development arm in Cambridge the team carried the desktop on into OpenServer, where it was called xdt3 and was joined by Panorama, their own Motif window manager with virtual desktops. By the time CDE became the industry's joint answer to the same question in 1993, X.desktop was already five years old, which in this genre meant it was doomed. Anderson later founded the payments company Bango.