5 ms·
DECwindows Motif
- hackyhacky 9mo agoAnyone here going to the VMS bootcamp? [1] [1] https://events.vmssoftware.com/bootcamp-malmo-2026 https://events.vmssoftware.com/bootcamp-malmo-2026
- tombert 9mo agoI used to work for a convention planning company, so I shouldn't be surprised, but I somehow am surprised that there are enough VMS users to justify a conference. I have genuinely not heard of anyone using VMS in any context in more than twenty years.
- dcminter 9mo agoI'm rather tempted. I'm funemployed at the moment and live over in Stockholm so it's just a (long) train journey away. I used to enjoy messing around on Vaxen in my college days. I can't see myself ever using VMS professionally though, and it has a somewhat vague description of the actual content. It's not super expensive but I'd have to fork out for the travel and accommodation. I'd love to hear about it if anyone does a write-up after the fact.
- tokyobreakfast 9mo agoI miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothing more. Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.
- cturner 9mo ago"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.
- ofrzeta 9mo agoYou can use a CDE lookalike https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
- pjmlp 9mo agoSafe languages have nothing to do with it, case in point, the choice of programming languages available on VMS. Which contrary to UNIX did not had the C mistake. Rather Structured BASIC, Extended Pascal, COBOL, Modula-2, Fortran and Bliss. It is really sloppy programming nowadays, regardless of the languages.
- Tor3 9mo agoHm? VMS also had K&R C, and a simulator I worked with at the time was written (not by me) using that compiler.
- dhosek 9mo agoIndeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself. Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).
- nineteen999 9mo agoMuch of VMS was eventually rewritten in C to accomodate the Alpha.
- pjmlp 9mo agoBy then it was OpenVMS.
- nineteen999 9mo agoVery familiar with it. Ran it in production for a major gambling company in my country for years. The stability was okay (no better than say Solaris) but the ergonomics for administrators and developers was absolutely horrid. The Alpha though? It's a shame DEC couldn't push it hard enough to prevent x86_64 from happening.
- toast0 9mo ago> Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Well, of course it takes more ram when we run 4x the pixels for the same size screen. And we double the refresh rate, but then hold everything back a frame to composite it. :P
- ahartmetz 9mo agoI think the one frame delay is due to X11 clients rendering a frame, then the X compositor rendering a frame, both according to the usual timing rules. With Wayland, it should be easier for client and compositor to render in the same frame interval because the compositor properly controls frame timing. It can just tell clients to render slightly early, then use the remaining few milliseconds for compositing.
- hapless 9mo agoThe Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.
- pjmlp 9mo agoNot really, because it wasn't a thing when Motif took off.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jmward01 9mo agoI saw DEC windows and immediately thought of Windows NT 3.1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1 [edit] So, I guess the history of 'windows NT' is lost on many. 'NT' started with version 3.1 as the MS/IBM breakup from the joint OS/2 venture happened. It was their first real push into 32 bit protected mode operating systems and supported really crazy cool things like 'multiple processors' and totally different architectures than x86, like DEC. Give the link a look.
- hnlmorg 9mo agoYou’ve linked to NT, not Win 3.x They were entirely different OSs. Edit: the previous poster has since completely rewritten this comment to talk about windows NT. they originally talked about Windows (without the NT) then linked to an NT wiki. Hence my reply. @OP Poor show on your ninja edit.
- jmward01 9mo agoNo, I linked to Windows NT 3.1. The history here is important. It supported DEC alpha, hence the post.
- hnlmorg 9mo agoExcept NT 3.1 is still NT and NT didn’t “invent” the 3.1 design. They modelled it after Windows 3.1 (though technically Windows 3.0) and named NT as NT 3.1 for brand familiarity. So NT 3.1 != Windows 3.1 As you said “history here is important”.
- jmward01 9mo agoI'm not sure what you think I was implying with my post? The history I was pointing out was Windows NT 3.1 supported the DEC alpha processor (3.1 was marketing and implied the UI was similar to windows 3.x, which it was). This was a connection between DEC and windows that I thought was interesting and not the subject of the post, but in some interesting ways ties the two together. DEC did many things for a very long time like make machines, operating systems and processors [1] and is likely good fodder for a top level HN post in its own right. I remember dreaming about running a DEC NT3.1 machine when I heard about it. I had a friend in the AF who showed me the install disks for NT 3.1, a double stack of 1.44mb 3.5" disks. It must have taken hours to install. Anyways, that is the linkage. Take a look. It is fun history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation
- flomo 9mo agoI dunno what's interesting about this link, but Motif has been LGPL a while and the last release was in 2017. https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/files/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_%28software%29 (in some alternate universe, motif was under the x11 license and you would have motif v13 instead of GTK.)
- mhd 9mo agoThat's a cruel alternate universe, I would've hoped that Motif being in use by more people than just the devs of one homebrew Unix desktop would mean that we wouldn't have suffered through that much versionitis.
- hapless 9mo agomotif had the opposite of versionitis from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`
- mhd 9mo ago> motif had the opposite of versionitis I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)
- flomo 9mo agoThe version number was just a joke. But if the "standard unix gui toolkit" was under an open source license back in the 1990s, I am sure people would have run with that rather than inventing something else.
- hapless 9mo agoIt's Motif on VMS, which is not remotely UNIX-like eventually HPE got tired of dealing with VMS customer requests and sold the rights to VMS Software Inc, who ported it from Itanium to x86 as soon as humanly possible now VMS Software Inc, is stating that they wish to support ye olde DECWindows and Motif on the modern, x86-enabled VMS
- shrubble 9mo agoThere are at least, for those wanting a Linux or BSD based Motif fix: Enhanced Motif Window Manager https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html and the full-fledged CDE desktop that uses Motif also: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (note that you want to firewall this somehow as the default settings on the background process ttdb can be a security hole)
- snvzz 9mo agoUTF-8 support very welcome.
- nineteen999 9mo agoI got this patched and up and running on my own LFS distro a few years back, lots of fun. It even has some support for antialiased fonts these days.
- chasil 9mo agoRed Hat recently removed Motif from their distribution. I wonder if it's still in AIX. https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6113101 https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6113101
- Tor3 9mo ago"I wonder if it's still in AIX." lslpp -l|grep -i motif X11.adt.motif 7.1.5.31 COMMITTED AIXwindows Application Development Toolkit Motif X11.compat.lib.X11R6_motif 7.1.5.31 COMMITTED AIXwindows X11R6 Motif 1.2 & X11.motif.lib 7.1.5.31 COMMITTED AIXwindows Motif Libraries X11.motif.mwm 7.1.1.0 COMMITTED AIXwindows Motif Window X11.msg.en_US.motif.lib 7.1.3.0 COMMITTED AIXwindows Motif Lib. Msgs - X11.msg.en_US.motif.mwm 7.1.3.0 COMMITTED AIX Motif Window Mgr Msgs - oslevel -r 7100-03
- hapless 9mo agoI think aix still ships CDE, too which would be unremarkable except none of the UNIX vendors has produced a new build in like 30 years so if they are still shipping CDE it is probably 32 bit binaries from AIX 4 or AIX 5L
- hapless 9mo ago"deprecated" is not "removed" it can take literally decades for a deprecated package to actually get removed, because customers get mad
- chasil 9mo agoI think it is removed from rhel10. I can check if you want. The entire 32-bit subsystem (multilib) is also removed from rhel10.
- jmclnx 9mo agoIt is as of 2 years ago, the last time I had access to AIX. many proprietary applications on AIX used Motif Libs.
- zippyman55 9mo agoI still have my Vax 780 pen.
- kjs3 9mo agoI have a Vax 730. But you can lift a pen. :-)
- zippyman55 9mo agoyes;1
- BSDobelix 9mo agoDual booting OpenVMS (not virtualization) would be a really cool thing.
- ch_123 9mo agoSome folks have had success running it on certain server hardware (Usually HPE Proliant). There are no graphics drivers for x86, so it is X forwarding only.
- anonymousiam 9mo agoI purchased a copy of OSF Motif for Linux (x86) sometime in the early 1990's (before it was free). I had used it before on SunOS and I liked it. One of the most annoying things about it was that it did not address the endianness of the arguments to the library functions. So it worked fine on big endian platforms, but not so fine on little endian ones (such as Intel). It would still work okay if you byte swapped the arguments in and out of the library functions, but it just seemed silly to need to do that, and it made it more difficult to write portable code.