SunView (Sun Visual Integrated Environment for Workstations) was an early windowing system from Sun Microsystems.

SunView was superseded by NeWS. SunView programs were not supported beyond Solaris 2.2. NeWS merged with MIT's X Window System. Sun followed with XView, a toolkit for the X Window System with an API similar to that of SunView.

Productivity applications bundled under SunView

SunView ran on desktop workstations with a full suite of graphical productivity applications (including email, calendaring, text editor, clock, preferences gui, menu management interface, etc.) This environment was close to 20 years ahead of the market — such clients and server software did not ship with base OSs for decades. Even in the early 2000s, Microsoft sells Outlook and Exchange, which are two separate products, which SUN bundled in SunView and SunOS for free.

SUN’s original SunView application suite was later ported to SUN’s OPEN LOOK OpenWindows environment. There was a competing windowing tool kit product called MOTIF. The Open Systems industry was embroiled in a battle which would last for years. There was eventually a compromise: SUN’s pioneering (SunView, later OpenWindows) bundled applications would be ported yet again to MOTIF and the result would be called CDE. This became the standard across all Open Systems vendors.

What made SunView so important in the industry was the full suite of group productivity applications that Sun had bundled with the desktop workstations. While the underlying windowing infrastructure changed, protocols changes, and windowing systems changed - the SUN applications remained largely the same.

SUN later announced the migration to GNOME from CDE. The familiar applications, which originated back in SunView, may finally see an end to their 20 year old code base.

Sun software | System software | Widget toolkits