Looking Glass (UNIX desktop)

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Back of Caldera Network Desktop 1.0 box, including a screen-shot of Looking Glass ND1.jpg
Back of Caldera Network Desktop 1.0 box, including a screen-shot of Looking Glass

Looking Glass is a desktop environment for computers running the UNIX operating system. Developed by Visix Software, it was sold commercially until Visix went out of business. [1]

In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system, which share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile computing. Desktop GUIs help the user to easily access and edit files, while they usually do not provide access to all of the features found in the underlying operating system. Instead, the traditional command-line interface (CLI) is still used when full control over the operating system is required.

Looking Glass was used as the desktop software bundled with INTERACTIVE UNIX System and Caldera OpenLinux [2] .

Caldera OpenLinux (COL) is a defunct Linux distribution that was originally introduced by Caldera in 1997 based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, and then taken over and further developed by Caldera Systems since 1998. A successor to the Caldera Network Desktop put together by Caldera since 1995, OpenLinux was an early "business-oriented distribution" and foreshadowed the direction of developments that came to most other distributions and the Linux community generally.

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References

  1. "Galaxy's Demise". New Planet Software (citing Computer Industry News). 1998-03-25.
  2. "Caldera Network Desktop v 1.0". Linux Journal. 1995-12-01.