AUIS Project Overview

The Andrew User Interface System (AUIS) is a compound document environment from Carnegie Mellon University's Andrew Consortium, directed by Wilfred J. Hansen.

Three Principal Components

1. Andrew Toolkit (ATK) — Portable, dynamically-loadable, object-oriented UI toolkit. Objects ("insets") embed recursively in one another. Open for programmer-created insets. Source in atk/.

2. Andrew User Environment (AUE) — Applications built on ATK: ez (word processor/editor), figure (drawing), messages (mail/bboards), bush (directory browser), help (docs), console/typescript (shell), bdffont (fonts), prefed (preferences), plus ezprint, preview, datacat, nessrun.

3. Andrew Message System (AMS) — Multi-media mail and bulletin boards with authentication, return receipts, auto-sorting, vote collection, enclosures, audit trails. Source in ams/ and atkams/.

Embeddable Insets

Interactive: eq (equations), fad (animation), figure (drawing), layout, lset (split view), ness (scripting), org (hierarchies), page (multi-page), raster (bitmap), table (spreadsheet), text.

Non-interactive: clock, header/footer, image (JPEG/GIF/TIFF), link (hypertext), month (calendar), note (annotation), timeoday, writestamp.

Architecture

• Built on "Class" — a dynamic C object model, contemporary of Objective C (overhead/class/)
• Dynamic object loader evolved through SunOS 4 / Solaris 2 dynamic loading, then C++ port
• v6.3 (Dec 1996): free public release in C
• v7.x: members-only, C++ transition
• v8.0 (Jan 1997): C++ version ("not extensively tested"); adds dynlink, c++conv, genstatl in overhead

Source Tree Layout

• atk/ — toolkit (insets and apps)
• overhead/ — infrastructure (class system, bison, fonts, cmenu, mail, regex, utils)
• ams/ — message system
• atkams/ — ATK/AMS integration
• config/ — build config (Imakefile/imake)
• contrib/ — contributed code
• doc/ — docs (ADMINISTRATOR, DEVELOPER, PROGRAMMER, HELP)
• ossupport/ — OS portability

File Format

ATK datastream: text-based, LaTeX-like markup. \begindata{type,id} / \enddata{type,id} framing for embedded objects. \view{viewclass,id,...} for rendering hints. See ATK Datastream Format.

Converters exist: ATK to/from RTF, ASCII, PostScript, troff, ppm, Scribe, X window dump.

Platforms

IBM RS/6000 (AIX), Sun 3/4 (SunOS, Solaris), DEC VAX/MIPS (Ultrix, BSD), HP 300/900, Linux i386, NetBSD, BSDI, Mac II (MacMach), Apollo (DomainOS), SGI (IRIX), SCO.

This Archive

Contains: v6.3 source (auis-6.3/, auis-6.3.1/), v8.0 source (andrew-8.0/), binary distributions (bin-dist/), compressed tars (dist-6.3/), patches, FAQ, newsletters, papers, and the ia-archive of info-andrew mailing list postings.

Why: Understanding the full scope of AUIS is essential for navigating this archive and planning work like document format conversion.

How to apply: When working in this project, know that the core abstraction is the "inset" — a self-contained object that reads/writes its own datastream segment and can be embedded anywhere. The format converter we're building needs to handle this recursive inset structure.