ManaGeR or MGR was an early windowing system originally designed and developed for Sun computers in 1984 by Stephen A. Uhler, then at Bellcore.
MGR featured overlapped, asynchronous windows and an applications interface that was both machine and network independent.
Each MGR window had support for both character terminal operations as well as basic graphics operations. It was controlled by mousing pop-up menus, by keyboard interaction, and by escape sequences written on pseudo-terminals by client software.
The system was presented at the USENIX Fourth Computer Graphics Workshop in 1987 as "MGR - a Window System for UNIX".[1] The entire MGR source code was posted to the comp.sources.unix Usenet newsgroup, Volume 17, Issue 1, in January 1989.[2]
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MGR provided each client window with:
All these features worked equally well if the client program was executing on the same computer as the MGR server or if the client was executed on a remote computer. The type of connection was insignificant. You could use telnet over TCP/IP or a modem dial-up connection equally well, for instance.
External programs such as Stephen Uhler's own MTX [3] and Howard Chu's rmgr made it possible to multiplex several windows over a single connection to a remote host, even using a normal modem dial-up connection.
A later feature, $HOME MOVIE,[4] made it possible to record user interaction for later display.
MGR ran on at least these systems: SunOS on Sun workstations, the original development platform, Macintosh, Unix System V on the AT&T UnixPC, Ultrix on DECstation 3100, MiNT on Atari ST, OS-9, Coherent, Linux, FreeBSD and VSTa.