OPEN LOOK - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

OPEN LOOK is a graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

(GUI) specification for UNIX

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

workstations. It was originally defined in the late 1980s by Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

and AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

History

OPEN LOOK was created in the late 1980s, a time when there was little or no standardization in Unix graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

s (GUIs); the X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

was emerging as the likely de facto standard for Unix graphical displays, but its designers had deliberately chosen not to specify any look and feel

Look and feel

In software design, look and feel is a term used in respect of a graphical user interface and comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces , as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes, and menus...

guidelines, leaving this up to application and window manager

Window manager

A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment...

developers. At the same time, there was increasing use of GUIs in non-UNIX operating systems: the Apple Macintosh

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

was released in early 1984, followed by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

Windows 1.0

Windows 1.0 is a 16-bit graphical operating environment, developed by Microsoft and released on 20 November 1985. It was Microsoft's first attempt to implement a multi-tasking graphical user interface-based operating environment on the PC platform. Windows 1.0 was the first version of Windows...

and Amiga Workbench in 1985.

As AT&T contemplated its next major revision to Unix, which would eventually become SVR4, it was clear that in order to remain competitive with other operating systems, Unix should have a standard GUI definition. One other concern of the time also needed to be taken into account: in March 1988, Apple filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft had copied the Macintosh look and feel.

The specification was a collaboration between Sun and AT&T, which were partnering in the development of SVR4. Xerox PARC was also credited for having not only done the pioneering work in the industry for graphical user interfaces, but also for contributing to OPEN LOOK's "design, review, implementation, testing, and refinement". Involving Xerox, including licensing technology from them, was felt to serve as protection from any future legal entanglements.

The OPEN LOOK specification was announced in April 1988. The following month, a group of competitors to AT&T and Sun formed the Open Software Foundation

Open Software Foundation

The Open Software Foundation was a not-for-profit organization founded in 1988 under the U.S. National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 to create an open standard for an implementation of the UNIX operating system.-History:...

(OSF), as a counter to their collaborative efforts. The OSF created the Motif

Motif (widget toolkit)

In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a...

GUI as its alternative to OPEN LOOK.

Description

OPEN LOOK is distinguished by its oval buttons, triangle glyphs to indicate pull-down and pull-right menus, and "pushpins" which allowed the user to make dialog boxes and palettes stay visible. The overall philosophy was to provide a clean, simple and uncluttered interface, so that the user's focus would be on the application rather than the interface. In fact, the original OPEN LOOK design was black and white only; a "three-dimensional" look and feel with shading was added later, in response to the 3-D style effects in Motif.

It is a definition of a look and feel rather than a specific implementation, so it could actually be implemented with different programming toolkits or even on different underlying window systems—implementations were created for both the X Window System (X) and Sun's NeWS

NeWS

NeWS was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal...

.

Sun developed an X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

distribution based on the OPEN LOOK look and feel, calling it OpenWindows

OpenWindows

OpenWindows was a desktop environment for Sun Microsystems workstations which handled SunView, NeWS, and X Window System protocols. OpenWindows was included in later releases of the operating systems SunOS 4 and Solaris, until its removal in Solaris 9 in favor of Common Desktop Environment and...

. Its programming implementation for the OPEN LOOK look and feel was a choice of either the OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit (OLIT

OLIT

OLIT is a widget toolkit from Sun Microsystems introduced in 1988, providing an OPEN LOOK user interface for X Window System applications...

) or XView

XView

XView is a widget toolkit from Sun Microsystems introduced in 1988. It provides an OPEN LOOK user interface for X Window System applications, with an object-oriented application programming interface for the C programming language...

. The former was built on the Xt

Intrinsics

X Toolkit Intrinsics is a library used in the X Window System. More precisely, it is a library that uses the low-level Xlib library and provides a friendly API to develop X11 software with graphical widgets...

Intrinsics toolkit common to X; the latter used the same paradigm as the GUI libraries for Sun's earlier SunView

SunView

SunView was a windowing system from Sun Microsystems developed in the early 1980s. It was included as part of SunOS, Sun's UNIX implementation; unlike later UNIX windowing systems, much of it was implemented in the system kernel...

window system, making it relatively easy to use it to migrate applications from SunView to X.

There was also The NeWS Toolkit, or TNT, which as the name implies implemented OPEN LOOK for NeWS applications; support for NeWS applications was removed from OpenWindows in 1993.

In 1990, Unix System Laboratories

Unix System Laboratories

Unix System Laboratories was originally organized as part of Bell Labs in 1989. USL joined with the UNIX Software Operation, also a Bell Laboratories division, in 1990. It assumed responsibility for Unix development and licensing activities...

(USL) inherited OLIT from AT&T

AT&T

along with UNIX

Unix

. Not long after, the codebase for OLIT diverged as Sun and USL took its development in different directions. Sun continued to enhance its version to make its look and feel more consistent with XView. USL, in an attempt to create an API to make applications GUI independent, developed the awkwardly named MoOLIT

MoOLIT

MoOLIT is a graphical user interface library and application programming interface created by Unix System Laboratories in an attempt to create a bridge between the two competing look-and-feels for Unix workstations at the time: OPEN LOOK and OSF Motif.The library provided common GUI features such...

(from Motif OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit), which kept the OLIT API, but allowed users to choose which GUI they wanted at run time. The source to MoOLIT was licensed by MJM Software, who ported it to several other Unix platforms. It was used for several years, almost exclusively by AT&T and Lucent Technologies

Lucent Technologies

Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc., originally Lucent Technologies, Inc. is a French-owned technology company composed of what was formerly AT&T Technologies, which included Western Electric and Bell Labs...

, who wanted to give their existing OPEN LOOK applications a Motif look and feel. It was not widely used elsewhere.

Demise

By June 1993, the major UNIX players, including AT&T and Sun, had decided that a truly unified Unix was necessary in order to better compete against Microsoft and had formed the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. The unified desktop for this initiative became the Common Desktop Environment

Common Desktop Environment

The Common Desktop Environment is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit.- Corporate history :...

(CDE), and the look and feel chosen for it was based on Motif. Sun announced its plans to immediately offer Motif and start retiring OpenWindows, by then the predominant implementation of the OPEN LOOK look and feel.

Sun began by offering the Motif developer toolkit and mwm

Motif Window Manager

In computing, the Motif Window Manager is an X window manager based on the Motif toolkit.MWM is a lightweight and, by today's standards, extremely minimalist window manager. MWM lacks support for desktop icons or virtual desktops. A plain text file is used to generate a root menu that the user can...

window manager

X window manager

An X window manager is a window manager which runs on top of the X Window System, a windowing system mainly used on Unix-like systems.Unlike the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows platforms which have historically provided a vendor-controlled, fixed set of ways to control how windows and panes display...

as a standalone product for use with Sun's Solaris Operating System

Solaris Operating System

Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is now known, has been owned by Oracle Corporation since Oracle's acquisition of Sun in January 2010....

until CDE was released in 1995. OpenWindows remained the primary Solaris desktop environment until 1997, when CDE became the primary desktop for Solaris 2.6. Even then, OpenWindows was still included with Solaris and could continue to be used instead of CDE.

When Solaris 9 was released in 2002, development support for XView and OLIT-based applications was finally removed, as were the olwm

Olwm

olwm was the default stacking window manager for OpenWindows, the original desktop environment included with SunOS and Solaris...

window manager and the OPEN LOOK versions of the DeskSet productivity tools.

Applications already developed using XView and OLIT can still be executed and displayed in both Solaris 9 and 10. There are also at least two projects continuing development of OpenWindows software: "OWAcomp" makes it possible to still use the OPEN LOOK Deskset tools, as well as compile OPEN LOOK applications; "openlook" is based on OpenWindows code released as open source, but has added additional components that were not open sourced by Sun.

History

Description

Demise

Further reading