AlphaWindows

AlphaWindows was a proposed industry standard from the Display Industry Association (an industry consortium in California) in the early 1990s that would allow a single CRT screen to implement multiple windows, each of which was to behave as a distinct computer terminal. Individual vendors offered products based on this in 1992 through the end of the 1990s.

These products were targeted at a low-end market.

The initial concept relied on custom (but low-cost) terminals which would support mouse interaction, (text) windowing support, and colored text. With that, plus special host software, the vendors proposed to support semi-graphical applications "transparently".

Organization
The Display Industry Association was at the same location as Cumulus Technology (the same street address in Palo Alto, CA). Cumulus was a manufacturer of displays since 1986. Cumulus was heavily involved with development of the AlphaWindows standard. The members of the association in 1993 were:


 * Terminal vendors:
 * AT&T / NCR / ADDS (partnership)
 * Cumulus
 * DEC
 * Link / Wyse (partnership)
 * Microvitec
 * Siemens / Nixdorf (partnership)
 * TeleVideo


 * Software vendors:
 * Cumulus
 * JSB
 * Nutec
 * SSSI

Only Cumulus was proposing both to develop the terminals and the host software. However, Cumulus did not survive: it went bankrupt.

Software
JSB Software Technologies produced MultiView Mascot. As noted in Unix Review:

"MultiView Mascot helps users access graphical applications, such as Web sites and e-mail systems, from a character-based browser. It does so by mapping graphical applications to a multiwindowed character system. Although there is the inevitable loss of graphics and formatting, the result is surprisingly workable. A hot-key feature allows any old character terminal to offer switching between multiple applications at the same time, with no programming required."

, the product is owned by FutureSoft.

SSSI (Structured Software Solutions, Inc.) produced the FacetTerm session multiplexer.