AlphaWindows
AlphaWindows was a proposed industry standard from the Display Industry Association (an industry consortium in California) in the early 1990s that would allow a single CRT screen to implement multiple windows, each of which was to behave as a distinct computer terminal.[1][2] Individual vendors offered products based on this in 1992 through the end of the 1990s.[3][4][5] and after,[6]
These products were targeted at a low-end market: "for users that don't need the processing power of a personal computer or the complexity of an X Window terminal, the AlphaWindow terminals and software provides the same look and feel of windows-based graphical user interfaces on an Alphanumeric terminal".[6]
The initial concept relied on custom (but low-cost) terminals which would support mouse interaction, (text) windowing support, and colored text.[3] With that, plus special host software, the vendors proposed to support semi-graphical applications "transparently".
Contents
Organization
The Display Industry Association was at the same location as Cumulus Technology (the same street address in Palo Alto, CA).[1][7] Cumulus was a manufacturer of displays since 1986.[8][9] Cumulus was heavily involved with development of the AlphaWindows standard. The members of the association in 1993 were:[1]
- Terminal vendors
- AT&T / NCR / ADDS (partnership)
- Cumulus
- DEC
- Link / Wyse (partnership)
- MicroVitek
- Siemens / Nixdorf (partnership)
- TeleVideo
- Software vendors
- Cumulus
- JSB
- Nutec
- SSSI
Only Cumulus was proposing both to develop the terminals and the host software. However, Cumulus did not survive: it went bankrupt.[9][10][11]
Software
JSB Software Technologies produced MultiView Mascot. As noted in Unix Review:[12]
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MultiView Mascot helps users access graphical applications, such as Web sites and e-mail systems, from a character-based browser. It does so by mapping graphical applications to a multiwindowed character system. Although there is the inevitable loss of graphics and formatting, the result is surprisingly workable. A hot-key feature allows any old character terminal to offer switching between multiple applications at the same time, with no programming required.
As of 2007[update], the product is owned by FutureSoft.[13][14]
SSSI (Structured Software Solutions, Inc.) produced the FacetTerm session multiplexer.[15]
References
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