CDE: What is is, what it's not, and why you want it.

Simson L. Garfinkel


It wasn't so long ago that most people who were using Unix were sitting down 
at the keyboard of a Digital VT100 (or similar) dumb terminal.  Of course, 
that didn't really matter, because most Unix program, like ed(1), thought that
the user was looking into the platin of an ASR33 Teletype. Indeed,  it was programs
like vi(1), the "Visual" editor, and curses(3x), a function library which
let programs run on more than one kind of video terminal, which contributed to
to the Berkeley Unix in the first place.

When the computers built for the early Stanford University Network showed up
with screens that could display nearly a million pixels, a lot of people
were amused. "What to do with all of the pixels?" Soon we found out the
discouraging answer. Those first SUNs were so slow, that many of their
first users used the bitmapped screens to run VT100 emulators, and nothing more.

One of Sun Microsystem's first innovations was a program called SunTools, a
graphical user interface that made it possible to have more than one terminal
emulator on the screen at the same time. Indeed, f
or some reason that nobody was ever able to figure
out, SunTools actually came with two terminal emulators: one called 
Terminal Tool, which was a real VT100 emulator,
and one called Command Tool, which kept a scrollback history of everything
that you had done during your login session. SunTools also came with a clock,
a program to show the computer's current load, a not-very-good text editor, and
a few other accessories. 

Over the years, SunTools evolved into Open Windows. The change was
evolutionary, not revolutionary. The tools seemed to get better, but a
lot of weirdness remained, like the need for two seperate terminal
emulators. Meanwhile, the rest of the Unix computer industry made some
truely significant steps in user interface design. Steve Jobs put a
friend front-end on top of Unix with NeXTSTEP.  Then the Open Software
Foundation developed an window interface library called Motief which
was designed to combine the look-and-feel of Microsoft Windows with a
window manager developed by Hewlett Packard. While Sun for the most
part thumbed its nose at these developments, Sun's users did not. Soon
they were demanding the same usability improvements that had benefited
the users of other computers. 

Software vendors, meanwhile, increasing were resenting the need to
develop a different version of their program for the five or six major
different versions of Unix, which together represented a market that
was only one tenth the size of the market for Microsoft Windows, and a
fifth the size of the market for Macintosh software. Customers,
meanwhile, resented the added training costs of having to teach their
users how to use all of the different flavors of Unix that they
happened to have. Sensing the threat, the Unix Industry's major
players got together on March 17, 1993, and announced the formation of
the Common Operating Software Environment (COSE) for Unix-based
workstations. COSE would be a single API for software vendors;
programs written for COSE would run on any Unix workstation (once
compiled for the appropriate hardware platform). And all COSE programs
would have a similar look and feel.

Now, more than two years later, Sun has shipped the first fruits of
COSE: Sun's implementation of the Common Desktop Environment, CDE.


WHAT'S CDE?

CDE is a radically new user interface for Sun Solaris users. Compared
to Open Windows, everything about CDE is different. CDE turns Open
Windows into an evolutionary dead-end.

Sit down at 



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Figure #1: The COSE Club:

Hewlett-Packard Company
IBM, Corp.
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
SunSoft, Inc (SUN Microsystems)
Univel (Novell)
UNIX Systems Laboratories, Inc (Now part of Novell)
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