Linux User Space

The History of the Common Desktop Environment

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But you can't tell the proper history without talking about X, OPEN LOOK, Motif and lots of other tech! So we travel back to the late 60's to begin the retelling.

From Season 4, Episode 6 "Anything But Common"

https://youtu.be/-tycNQ-Ey9Q

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The History of The Common Desktop Environment (CDE)

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
The Andrew Project
https://web.archive.org/web/20120717074939/http://www.cmu.edu/corporate/news/2007/features/andrew/what_is_andrew.shtml
W was a windowing system that was originally written for the V operating system
https://web.archive.org/web/20040522163027/http://eia.udg.es/~teo/sd/documents/articles/p314-cheriton.pdf
In 1984, Robert Scheifler wrote
https://www.talisman.org/x-debut.shtml
X is our “reaction” to W
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/22949.24053
Ultrix Window Manager, or uwm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix_Window_Manager
Tom's Window Manager, which eventually became Tab Window Manager, or twm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm
Open Look Specification
https://archive.org/details/openlookgraphica00sunm
The OSF narrows the search for a User Interface
https://books.google.com/books?id=szsEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=open look&f=false
HP and Microsoft's CXI and DEC's XUI to create the HP OSF/Motif Window Manager
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Company-Publications/HP-Journal/90s/HPJ-1990-06.pdf
Sun went on to build OpenWindows, which was X with OPEN LOOK on top to replace SunView.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWindows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView
COSE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Open_Software_Environment
In 1994, The OSF and Unix International, a body meant to standardize UNIX, merged
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.osf.misc/c/Q2uTrTvB8bY/m/8SMI8V-JvE4J
and in 96, merged again with X/Open into The Open Group
https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1996/0214.html
Motif and CDE became one
https://groups.google.com/g/cu.motif-talk/c/xMQ-2cBi9bU/m/_VTikcvANZkJ
KDE enters the scene
https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Iat_s/m/zv_D_2ctS8sJ
May of 2000 when Motif was released as OpenMotif
https://web.archive.org/web/20131003125200/https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.windows.x.announce/K2LrU6QusnA/5fRzz-NBIrAJ
LessTif, because Less is Mo, published an initial statement
https://web.archive.org/web/20000619030034/http://www.lesstif.org/future.html
August 6th, 2012, CDE was relicensed under the LGPL and was available on SourceForge, where it still lives today
https://web.archive.org/web/20121124230739/http://devio.us/~kpedersen/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1293
After opening it up, 2.2.1 was released on March 1st, 2014
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/mailman/message/32043063/
The final release, at least as of this recording, 2.5.1, dropped in October of 2022
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/mailman/message/37715846/

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