OpenLook

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OPEN LOOK or OpenLook was an early graphical user interface (GUI) specification developed by Sun Microsystems and AT&T in the early 1990s for UNIX workstations. It had its origins in SunOS 2.1, SunView and Sun's Motorola 68000-based UNIX workstations. OpenLook was distinguised by its oval-shaped buttons, triangle pull down menus and pushpins which allowed dialog boxes and palettes to stay visible. Because it was a specification at the user level, it could actually be implemented in different ways underneath -- using X Window System or Sun's NeWS toolkit. The specification was a collaboration between Sun and AT&T, which had an alliance back to develop UNIX and graphical toolkits. OpenLook had a usable pallete of 256 colours.

In the early 1990s, its main competitor was the OSF Motif GUI or the vanilla X Window System TWM window manager and Athena widgets. At the time, Motif was backed by the rest of the workstation industry, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation.

In an attempt to create an API to make applications GUI independent, Sun and AT&T tried to develop the awkwardly named MoOLIT, which was a Motif-OpenLook library with common GUI features such as boxes, menus, lists, buttons, etc., but allowed users to choose which GUI they wanted at runtime. It was not considered a very successful product and was not widely used.

Shortly after the industry had made its intentions clear, OpenLook was dropped by Sun in favor of Common Desktop Environment and Motif.