I think XVision has a sufficiently complicated history which warrants a slightly closer look. You see, we're looking at the work of three distinct companies here. Visionware, IXI, and SCO. Some of these names might seem familiar.

If you've used SCO Unix you've probably run across the "SCO Desktop", and if you look closer, you'll find out that it was an IXI product (XDesktop) with some applications also by IXI (XDeskware).

IXI's desktop (and applications) were also used by other Unix vendors at the time, and it was a fairly good system. I promise I will get around to doing a write-up on it at some point.

But I digress.

IXI had such a good relationship with SCO that in 1993 SCO acquired IXI.

IXI and SCO also collaborated with Visionware who were also acquired by SCO, this time in 1994. The result eventually became SCO XVision Eclipse, a copy of which I received along with UnixWare 7.1.1.

While building a virtualised installation of Windows 3.11, I was doing some searching for networking software when I stumbled across some disk images labelled "XVision". That piqued my interest, and I wondered if that was the same thing as SCO XVision.

So I downloaded them, and threw them at my VM with such force that it installed itself right on to the hard drive image.

All the memories of installing XVision on Windows 95 came back to me, right down to the exact same graphics drawing optimisation tests.

The compressed archive containing the disk images also included scans of the original box.

I must admit, being able to connect to ancient systems via ancient X on another ancient system is kinda cool–at least, to me it's cool… I'm a no-life freak after all :)

XVision's X server is pretty decent. It has all the usual features of X from that time period, and works pretty well.

I've tested it with DECwindows, CDE, and UWM across Ultrix, OSF/1, Solaris, and UnixWare.

Though, I think this is probably the most obscene colour scheme I've seen so far:

UWM is probably my favourite retro window manager, and it looks pretty reasonable with my .Xresources set up the way I like them.

It's just a shame that I'm limited to 30 days of use. I need to find a way of solving that.

Ok, so this is the big letdown. XVision Eclipse had some decent terminals–not brilliant, but decent. It supported ANSI, Wyse, and DEC. Claiming, I believe, conformance with level 4 terminals (e.g. VT420).

The terminal emulator on XVision 5.x is simply called "vt52", which does not inspire much hope.

As a quick refresher, the DEC VT52 was the most dumb of dumb terminals back in the day, supporting only uppercase characters and with a very limited control sequence set.

Although I managed my expectations–I wasn't expecting it to do a DEC VT340 with ReGIS and Sixel–I was expecting somewhat decent VT100 support.

I couldn't even clear the screen :(

I'm still in need of a decent terminal emulator for Windows 3 if anyone has any suggestions–preferably one that can at least do DEC level 2 terminals (e.g. VT220).

XVision includes some software that can use a mixture of ftp, rlogin, rexec et al to give you a file browser of sorts. I found this particular part of XVision Eclipse to be an absolute crashfest on Windows 95, but I'm not sure if that's indicative of bad programming, or just the fact that it tries to be too much like File Explorer, or both.

The version on Windows 3 attempts to mimic File Manager, and feels a lot more solid. It's actually pretty reliable on every Unix host I have except for SVR5 on the simulated 3B2 (the TCP/IP stack is squarely to blame for that)

I have refrained from using this too much, as it is probably the one thing that requires actually reading the manual.

I think it also warrants its own write-up, which will appear here at some point, promise!