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Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were excl
by xyzzy3000 2y ago
Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4
If only it had been given the RISC OS GUI with BSD underneath - that would have been way easier to port to modern Unix-like foundations and may have had a healthier-but-niche future as something 'modern' beyond Acorn's existence.
- repelsteeltje 2y agoAh yes, Motif! Now I remember, I stand corrected. Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.
- rbanffy 2y agoThere was a free implementation called “lesstif” IIRC. Motif was proprietary until much later, as was CDE. IXI’s desktop runs on top of Motif.
- sillywalk 2y agoIIRC, KDE was created because Motif/CDE were proprietary, but QT was free and had an open-source license, but wasn't compatible with the GPL. There was an agreement with Troltech, the creators of QT that would make QT available under a BSD-style license if they didn't release a free/open-source version after a year. GNOME was created because of license issues with QT not being compatible with the GPL, so GNOME used GTK which was created by the GIMP project because Motif wasn't free.