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I miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothing more.

Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.

I purchased a copy of OSF Motif for Linux (x86) sometime in the early 1990's (before it was free). I had used it before on SunOS and I liked it.

One of the most annoying things about it was that it did not address the endianness of the arguments to the library functions. So it worked fine on big endian platforms, but not so fine on little endian ones (such as Intel).

It would still work okay if you byte swapped the arguments in and out of the library functions, but it just seemed silly to need to do that, and it made it more difficult to write portable code.

Red Hat recently removed Motif from their distribution. I wonder if it's still in AIX.

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6113101

I dunno what's interesting about this link, but Motif has been LGPL a while and the last release was in 2017.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/files/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_%28software%29

(in some alternate universe, motif was under the x11 license and you would have motif v13 instead of GTK.)

There are at least, for those wanting a Linux or BSD based Motif fix:

Enhanced Motif Window Manager https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

and the full-fledged CDE desktop that uses Motif also:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (note that you want to firewall this somehow as the default settings on the background process ttdb can be a security hole)

I still have my Vax 780 pen.

Dual booting OpenVMS (not virtualization) would be a really cool thing.

I saw DEC windows and immediately thought of Windows NT 3.1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1

[edit]

So, I guess the history of 'windows NT' is lost on many. 'NT' started with version 3.1 as the MS/IBM breakup from the joint OS/2 venture happened. It was their first real push into 32 bit protected mode operating systems and supported really crazy cool things like 'multiple processors' and totally different architectures than x86, like DEC. Give the link a look.

Anyone here going to the VMS bootcamp? [1]

[1] https://events.vmssoftware.com/bootcamp-malmo-2026