swm (the Solbourne window manager) is an
X Window System
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...
window manager
A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...
developed by Tom LaStrange at
Solbourne Computer
Solbourne Computer Inc. was originally a vendor of computer systems based in Longmont, Colorado, United States, at first 52% owned by Matsushita. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company produced a range of computer workstations and servers ...
in 1990. The most important innovation of swm was the introduction of the
virtual desktop
In computing, a virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces, usually within the WIMP paradigm, to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer's desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the s ...
. It also introduced a primitive form of session management (restoring programs in use at the time of shutdown) to X.
References
* Thomas E. LaStrange (1990
swm: An X window manager shell USENIX Summer.
* http://users.polytech.unice.fr/~buffa/cours/X11_Motif/motif-faq/part4/faq-doc-1.html
Free X window managers
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