IntlHarvester's Journal: Motif -- Bringing the ease of use of MS Windows 3.1 to Unix

Re:What Windows got from Unix (Score:2)
by paul.dunne (5922) on 08:18 AM March 24th, 2002 (#3216110)

You understand wrongly. The Motif docs themselves state:

"On December 30, 1988, OSF announced that the user environment
component offering will be based on several leading technologies:
Digital Equipment Corporation's toolkit technology (widgets)
and the joint Hewlett-Packard/Microsoft submission of H-P's 3-D
appearance and Microsoft's Presentation Manager-compatible behavior
(window manager)."

Or, to paraphrase: we copied Windows. If you want to be picky,
you can say instead: they copied a joint IBM/Windows standard (CUA,
isn't it?), but it amounts to the same thing.

----------

This turns out not to be the case.

The *look* of Motif was pretty much fixed in 1989, and was inherited from
HP's widget library. See Shiz Kobara's book for a nice summary of the
history that led up to the existing design. Windows's 3D look came later.

The *feel* of Motif was carefully, even assiduously, designed to be the
same as the Windows/Presentation Manager family. A great deal of effort
went into ensuring that every gesture you might make had the same (or
analogous) effect on the two families of systems. The rationale was that
people quickly acquire muscle memory, and the concept of "page down" or "go
to end" or "default button" should be converted to a physical movement at
the subconscious level, once learned.

This results on Windows and Motif users being able to switch from one
system to the other without going through the effort of training in a new
set of movements.

The Motif Style Guide retains a 1988 Microsoft copyright, and this is why.
--
David Brooks, Manager, Quality Engineering [e-mail]
X Consortium http://www.x.org/people/dbrooks/
Commit planned giving and daily acts of compassion.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.windows.x.i386unix/msg/3ab88ef0762eee10