SunView

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SunView (Sun Visual Integrated Environment for Workstations) was an early windowing system from Sun Microsystems. It was included as part of SunOS, Sun's UNIX implementation. SunView ran on Sun's desktop and deskside workstations, providing an interactive graphical environment for technical computing, document publishing, medical, and other applications in the 1980s, on high resolution monochrome, greyscale and color displays.

[edit] Productivity applications bundled under SunView

SunView included a full suite of graphical productivity applications (including email, calendaring, text editor, clock, preferences GUI, menu management interface, etc.). This environment was close to 20 years ahead of the market — such clients and server software did not ship with base OSes for decades.

Sun’s original SunView application suite was later ported to X, featuring the OPEN LOOK look and feel. Known as the DeskSet productivity tool set, this was one distinguishing element of Sun's OpenWindows desktop environment.

The DeskSet tools became a unifying element at the end of the Unix wars, where the open systems industry was embroiled in a battle which would last for years. As part of the COSE initiative, it was decided that Sun’s pioneering (SunView, later OpenWindows) bundled applications would be ported yet again, this time to the Motif widget toolkit, and the result would be part of CDE. This became the standard for a time across all open systems vendors.

What made SunView so important in the industry was the full suite of group productivity applications that Sun had bundled with the desktop workstations. While the underlying windowing infrastructure changed, protocols changed, and windowing systems changed - the Sun applications remained largely the same, maintaining interoperability with previous implementations.

[edit] Successors

SunView was intended to be superseded by NeWS, a more sophisticated window system based on PostScript; however, the actual successor turned out to be the X Window System. Sun's original implementation of X included support for the display of SunView programs, a feature that was phased out after Solaris 2.2. Sun provided a toolkit for X called XView, with an API similar to that of SunView, simplifying the transition for developers between the two environments.

Sun later announced its migration to the GNOME desktop environment from CDE. The familiar applications, which originated back in SunView, may finally see an end to their 20 year old code base.

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.