[HN Gopher] The MGR Window System
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The MGR Window System
Author : floren
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-08-04 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hack.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hack.org)
| ggm wrote:
| I used it in 1985/6 at UCL-CS on a sun workstation, and it was
| lovely. The port to sunos had some issues. Mike Lesk from Bell
| labs was in residence and had brought it with him on a tape.
| (Mike invented UUCP)
|
| The thing is, the labs people hated time wasters (like me) They
| used a simple test as an entry key to investing in helping you:
| if you claimed to be a programmer and said there was a problem
| they waited for you to proffer patches..
| pdmccormick wrote:
| In the mid 2000s, the wireless network infrastructure at my
| university authenticated your device based on SSH'ing into a
| server. But the specific SSH server used at that time did not
| support password-less logins via keys, so it required typing in
| a password every time you connected (and WiFi was flakey in
| that environment in those days, so dropped connections weren't
| uncommon). I asked the IT support folks about this, and they
| told me that I should try adding it to the software. I figured
| out what it would take and wrote some patches, but then they
| said they couldn't run something customized like that. Years on
| their reasoning makes sense, but at the time it was really
| disappointing and I dropped the effort after that.
| jmclnx wrote:
| From reading the article, I think MGR was available for Coherent
| OS prior to its X implementation. I never used it myself but if I
| could go back....
| imiric wrote:
| Very cool to learn about this bit of history.
|
| I really enjoy how crisp and legible fonts and graphics are in
| that screenshot. Even the tiny terminal in the upper left is very
| clear. Achieving that in X was always an exercise in frustration
| IME, involving some obscure fontconfig incantations and specific
| bitmap fonts. Ultimately I couldn't live without font hinting,
| but there's something so appealing about that crisp bitmap look.
| mhd wrote:
| Another weird window system was the W system (not to be confused
| with the X predecessor). Mostly monochrome.
|
| https://eerott.mbnet.fi/historical/w1r2.html
| sbf501 wrote:
| Of all the apps in the upper left, I still to this day use xload
| and xclock. Xeyes was always kind of pointless to me. And xbiff
| is meaningless in today's world of email saturation.
| kragen wrote:
| Xeyes was occasionally useful for telling you when the machine
| it's running on has gone down or is too overloaded to be
| usable. In today's world of nested window systems it's also
| helpful for telling you if your mouse cursor movement is being
| delivered to a nested screen.
|
| Mostly, though, xeyes was "pointless" in the same sense that
| fine art is "pointless", like xneko, window manager themes,
| xshostakovich, or screensavers. It doesn't have a point; it is
| itself the point.
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| For me, xeyes can be useful on multiple high-DPI monitors
| where I occasionally lose the mouse.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Huh. Today I learned about Xeyes. Thanks!
| unixbane wrote:
| > If you want to compare MGR to the X Window System, you might
| consider the MGR server as something like a combination of an X
| server + window manager + xterm
|
| Sounds like a nightmare of in band signalling vulnerabilities.
|
| Edit: your downvote is invalid. you literally just did it because
| i wrote something negative about the topic of the thread. it's
| still true and a good point. this is similar to how youtube
| downvotes worked. i still upvoted the article because it was
| useful to me. i am rational you are not.
| kragen wrote:
| I always wondered about this, but I never dug into MGR enough
| to find out if they defended against it. Maybe the multiplexers
| rmgr and mtx were perfectly secure, and restricted the programs
| they ran to only manipulating their own window (which X11
| _doesn 't_ succeed at, or even attempt), but it seems like some
| kinds of compositions of programs might not play well with
| this.
|
| Also there were plenty of terminals that had escape-sequence
| vulnerabilities of the flavor "sending escape sequence X to the
| terminal will cause it to (immediately or later) send character
| sequence Y back to the host [which the host will interpret as a
| command]", like cross-site scripting. As I understand it, this
| kind of send-escape-sequence-X-to-bind-an-event-to-character-
| sequence-Y is exactly how MGR worked, and I wonder if it also
| had this vulnerability.
|
| This is usually, but not always, a matter of running one
| program after another; for example, write(1) (and I think
| wall(8) if enabled) would allow you to send arbitrary escape
| sequences to anybody's terminal at any time.
|
| Trusted path issues also seem like they could be a problem,
| though it's kind of a problem with Unix shells in terminals in
| general: when you hit ^Z to suspend a process and it drops you
| back to your shell, how do you know that it really suspended
| and that what you're typing to is really your shell? This could
| matter if you use "sudo". (It doesn't matter _that much_
| because by virtue of running the program in the first place you
| are giving all your authority to that program, unlike in
| capability-based systems.)
|
| You might want to remove your complaints about downvotes and
| boasts of rationality so people don't downvote you for them.
| Bancakes wrote:
| >Edit: your downvote is invalid. you literally just did it
| because i wrote something negative about the topic of the
| thread. it's still true and a good point. this is similar to
| how youtube downvotes worked. i still upvoted the article
| because it was useful to me. i am rational you are not.
|
| Oh grow up. Your edit is longer than the post.
| marttt wrote:
| I wonder if this system got any inspiration from Plan 9? It looks
| really similar to 81/2, Rob Pike's early window manager for Plan
| 9 [1]. Or even the Blit [2].
|
| I would love to try out MGR on the Linux framebuffer, though.
|
| Edit: found an interesting 2016 HN thread on "oldschool"
| windowing systems that also mentions both MGR and 81/2 [3].
|
| 1:
| http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/8%C2%BD.f...
|
| 2:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)#Windo...
|
| 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477565
| justin66 wrote:
| It predates Plan 9.
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| This is true motivation to keep me working out the ideal desktop
| environment for Linux on the Web. The idea of "a message passing
| facility enabling client programs to rendezvous and exchange
| messages" is in particular the kind of thing I want to continue
| to iterate upon, albeit in a more abstract sense than the kinds
| of windowing events that are referred to.
|
| https://lotw.site/desk
| teddyh wrote:
| Note: Article author has since moved to Wayland.
| ibotty wrote:
| https://hack.org/mc/blog/no-more-x11.html
| floren wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the note about older versions MGR working on
| the Macintosh. I may have to poke at the TUHS mailing list to see
| if anyone knows more.
| shrubble wrote:
| Stephen Uhler's home page, some papers about MGR are there,
| also... https://sau.homeip.net/
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