History
In the 1970s, the Xerox Alto became the first computer shipped with a working WIMP GUI. It used a stacking window manager that allowed overlapping windows. While it is unclear if Microsoft Windows contains designs copied from Apple's Mac OS, it is clear that neither was the first to produce a GUI using stacking windows. In the early 1980s, the Xerox Star, successor to the Alto, used tiling for most main application windows, and used overlapping only for dialogue boxes, removing most of the need for stacking.
GEM 1.1 was a window manager that supported the desktop metaphor, and used stacking, allowing all windows to overlap. It was released in the early 1980s. GEM is famous for having been included as the main GUI used on the Atari ST, which ran Atari TOS, and was also a popular GUI for MS-DOS prior to the widespread use of Microsoft Windows. As a result of a lawsuit by Apple, GEM was forced to remove the stacking capabilities, making it a tiling window manager.
Mac OS was one of the earliest commercially successful examples of a GUI that used a sort of stacking window management via QuickDraw. Currently Mac OS X uses a somewhat more advanced window manager that has supported compositing since Mac OS X 10.0, and was updated in Mac OS X 10.2 to support hardware accelerated compositing via the Quartz Compositor.
During the mid 1980s, Amiga OS contained an early example of a compositing window manager called Intuition (one of the low-level libraries of AmigaOS, which was present in Amiga system ROMs), capable of recognizing which windows or portions of them were covered, and which windows were in the foreground and fully visible, so it could draw only parts of the screen that required refresh. Additionally, Intuition supported compositing. Applications could first request a region of memory outside the current display region for use as bitmap. The Amiga windowing system would then use a series of bit blits using the system's hardware blitter to build a composite of these applications' bitmaps, along with buttons and sliders, in display memory, without requiring these applications to redraw any of their bitmaps.
Intuition also anticipated the choices of the user by recognizing the position of the pointer floating over other elements of the screen (title bars of windows, their close and resizing gadgets, whole icons), and thus it was capable of granting nearly a zero-wait state experience to the use of the Workbench window manager.
Noteworthy to mention is the fact that Workbench was the only window manager that eventually inspired an entire family of descendant and successors: Ambient in MorphOS, Zune/Wanderer in AROS, Workbench NG (New Generation in AmigaOS 4.0 and 4.1. Workbench 4.1 was enhanced by 2D vector interface powered by Cairo libraries, and presenting a modern Porter-Duff 3D based Compositing Engine.
In 1988, Presentation Manager became the default shell in OS/2, which, in its first version, only used a command line interface (CLI). IBM and Microsoft designed OS/2 as a successor to DOS and Windows for DOS. After the success of the Windows 3.10, however, Microsoft abandoned the project in favor of Windows. After that, the Microsoft project for a future OS/2 version 3 became Windows NT, and IBM made a complete redesign of the shell of OS/2, substituting the Presentation Manager of OS/2 1.x for the object-oriented Workplace Shell that made its debut in the OS/2 2.0.
Read more about this topic: Window Manager
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)