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.^[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".

Organization

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]

Software

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]