OSF Motif: the user interface standard

In all its versions and iterations, the Unix operating system has had one consistent drawback: its character-based user interface. The Open Software Foundation (OSF) took up the challenge of developing a vendor neutral graphical interface for UNIX. OSF'S first offering, the Motif graphical user interface, is made up of a window manager, which gives the user a standard environment for manipulating application windows, a user interface toolkit, which provides a standard application programming interface, a user interface language compiler, which provides easy design and modification of the user interface using a presentation description language, and the Motif Style Guide, which provides a description of the behavior and suggested appearance of Motif applications. Motif will run on any Unix system which supports the MIT X Window System, Version 11, Release 3, a de-facto standard windowing system. The most enduring quality of the Motif user interface is its consistency: consistency with the mechanical world, consistency with Presentation Manager behavior and the promise of consistency across a wide scale of Unix-based environments, from personal computers to mainframes.<
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