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AlphaWindows was a proposed industry standard from the Display Industry Association (an industry consortium in California) in the early 1990s that would allow a single CRT screen to implement multiple windows, each of which was to behave as a distinct computer terminal.[1][2] Individual vendors offered products based on this in 1992 through the end of the 1990s.[3][4][5]
These products were targeted at a low-end market.
The initial concept relied on custom (but low-cost) terminals which would support mouse interaction, (text) windowing support, and colored text.[3] With that, plus special host software, the vendors proposed to support semi-graphical applications "transparently".
The Display Industry Association was at the same location as Cumulus Technology (the same street address in Palo Alto, CA).[1][6] Cumulus was a manufacturer of displays since 1986.[7][8] Cumulus was heavily involved with development of the AlphaWindows standard. The members of the association in 1993 were:[1]
- Terminal vendors
- AT&T / NCR / ADDS (partnership)
- Cumulus
- DEC
- Link / Wyse (partnership)
- Microvitec [5]
- Siemens / Nixdorf (partnership)
- TeleVideo
- Software vendors
- Cumulus
- JSB
- Nutec
- SSSI
Only Cumulus was proposing both to develop the terminals and the host software. However, Cumulus did not survive: it went bankrupt.[8][9][10]
JSB Software Technologies produced MultiView Mascot. As noted in Unix Review:[11]
MultiView Mascot helps users access graphical applications, such as Web sites and e-mail systems, from a character-based browser. It does so by mapping graphical applications to a multiwindowed character system. Although there is the inevitable loss of graphics and formatting, the result is surprisingly workable. A hot-key feature allows any old character terminal to offer switching between multiple applications at the same time, with no programming required.
As of 2007[update], the product is owned by FutureSoft.[12][13]
SSSI (Structured Software Solutions, Inc.) produced the FacetTerm session multiplexer.[14]
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