AlphaWindows
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. Individual vendors offered products based on this in 1992 through the end of the 1990s.
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. With that, plus special host software, the vendors proposed to support semi-graphical applications "transparently".
Organization
The Display Industry Association was at the same location as Cumulus Technology (the same street address in Palo Alto, CA). Cumulus was a manufacturer of displays since 1986. Cumulus was heavily involved with development of the AlphaWindows standard. The members of the association in 1993 were:
- Terminal vendors
- AT&T / NCR / ADDS (partnership)
- Cumulus
- DEC
- Link / Wyse (partnership)
- Microvitec
- 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.
Software
JSB Software Technologies produced MultiView Mascot. As noted in Unix Review:
As of 2007[update], the product is owned by FutureSoft.
SSSI (Structured Software Solutions, Inc.) produced the FacetTerm session multiplexer.