Andrew User Interface System — Revival

A project to bring the Andrew User Interface System back to life on modern POSIX platforms.

AUIS is a compound document environment from Carnegie Mellon University (circa 1986–1997). Its editor, ez, lets users create documents with embedded objects — drawings, spreadsheets, equations, images — that nest recursively. The toolkit is extensible: new objects plug in without modifying existing applications.

Start here

revival.md is a narrative account of what's been done and why: old bugs the port uncovered that had sat undetected for decades, the 32-bit-to-64-bit issues behind most of them, the deliberate modernizations undertaken along the way (anti-aliased text rendering, a modern dynamic loader, current bison/flex), and the in-progress move to full ANSI C. Start there for the story — the documents below are the detailed record it's drawn from.

This project

We are reviving the 6.3.1 C codeline (the last public release, August 1994) rather than the later C++ port. The initial target platform is macOS/Darwin with XQuartz, building toward broader POSIX support.

See revival/doc/roadmap.md for current status and plans.

What's here

• src/ — AUIS 6.3.1 source (ATK, AMS, overhead, config, contrib)
• revival/doc/ — project documentation: revival.md (narrative summary), overview, ATK format spec, version comparison, quickstart, porting assessment, changelog, roadmap
• revival/tools/ —
  • ez2md converts ATK/ez documents to Markdown;
  • ansify converts K&R function definitions to ANSI C, guided by class-definition signatures — the current path for the ANSI C conversion;
  • fix-static-methods removes 'static' from ATK class method definitions;
  • modernize mechanical C modernization tool — retired as the primary K&R→ANSI conversion path (see the porting assessment), kept for its narrower fixups
• patches/ — official and contributed patches from the original archive
• bison/ — AUIS's modified GNU bison

Background

AUIS was developed at CMU as part of Project Andrew, a joint effort with IBM. It offered a word processor, mail system, drawing editor, font editor, help browser, and more — all built on the Andrew Toolkit (ATK), a dynamically-loadable object-oriented framework written in C using a system called "Class."

The original archive was mirrored from CMU's FTP server in June 2026.