Andrew Consortium Home Page

Welcome to Andrew

What is Andrew?

The Andrew User Interface System (AUIS) is a portable set of applications that runs under X11. It contains the following components:

The Andrew User Environment (AUE) is a set of editors and applications wherein objects can be embedded in one another. Thus, one could use our ``generic-object'' editor (ez) to edit text that contains not only multiple fonts, but embedded raster images, spreadsheets, drawing editors, equations, simple animations, etc. These embedded objects could themselves contain other objects, including text. Many objects are included in the release, including those mentioned above, along with a help system, a system monitoring tool (console), an editor based shell interface (typescript), and support for printing multi-media documents, making it useful to programmers and non-programmers alike.

The Andrew Message System (AMS) provides a multi-media interface to mail, mailing lists, and local and Usenet bulletin boards. AMS contains many advanced features, including authentication, return receipts, automatic sorting of mail, vote collection and tabulation, enclosures, audit trails of related messages, and subscription management. It also provides a variety of interfaces that support terminal interfaces and low-function personal computers in addition to the high-function workstations.

The Andrew Toolkit (ATK) is the programming environment used to create AUIS. It provides a dynamically-loadable object-oriented system, implemented in C. It also provides the system of object classes upon which AUE is built. Programmers can use ATK to create new embeddable AUE data types, or applications which use AUE data types and interfaces.

Andrew has been successfully compiled and used on (at least) these platforms:

What does Andrew look like?

This is a description of several parts of Andrew, with screen images of the software being used. (Warning: this file contains several large inlined images.)

If you are running X, you can also try Andrew yourself. See instructions on using the Remote Demo Service.

How can I use Andrew?

The source code for the most recent public release, AUIS 6.2, is free. See instructions for downloading the source code.

We also distribute free, ready-to-install AUIS 5.1 executables. (See the "features and changes" document below for differences between 5.1 and 6.2.) Executables are available for the following platforms:

See instructions for downloading these executables.

Other information

Here is an information flyer with more details about Andrew and the Andrew Consortium.

Here is a description of the features and changes available in the new Andrew version 6.2 release.

Here is the FAQ for Andrew (a long text file, about 60K.)

If you already have Andrew 5.1, you may want to download the "unknown" inset. This will allow you to safely view documents or mail which contain Andrew 6.2 insets and features. Follow the link for more information.

We are now distributing Bison A2.2, an enhanced version of GNU Bison 1.22 (an alternative to yacc.) This has some features that the GNU version does not. Also, we are distributing with it parser code which is not restricted by the GNU Public License or any other license; you can use this parser with Bison to produce parsers which are not restricted by the GPL.

You can browse through the source tree for AUIS 6.2. If you want. (Note that if you want to download the source, you should follow the link above labelled "instructions for downloading the source".)

Or, you can browse through our entire FTP archive, which contains all the files and archives referred to by our Web documents. (And the Web documents themselves, for that matter.)

And, yes, we're working on a nice HTML editor for AUIS. An initial version should be available soon. Watch this space.


For further information, send mail to info-andrew-request@andrew.cmu.edu

The Andrew Consortium is part of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

This page is maintained by Andrew Plotkin (ap1i+@andrew.cmu.edu)
(last update: 4/14/94)