Prior art goes back significantly further than any of the X based windows mangers. A number of the development enviroments at PARC had virtual displays which were significantly more powerful than what Microsoft is citing in the late 70s and early 80s.
The UI which most closely matches Microsoft claims was one called "Rooms" which appeared in a number of Xerox development environments (like Interlisp-D) in the early 1980s. The first paper I remember was in 1986 (CHI i think). Rooms permits multiple virtual screens, a "preview function" to see all your rooms, and a nice navigation to get between the "rooms". Elements of the Rooms UI was eventually turned into a UI which ran under Windows 3.1.
The first UI that I recall seeing which was related to this was the "Project" construct in Smalltalk. You can see a more advanced version of this in Squeak.
The ultimate form of this where the Views. You could have multiple viewers on one physical display at the same time, swap your screen between multiple viewers, have multiple heads displaying the save view, or move the view between machines (aka RemoteViewers) which was really useful when you went home and wanted to pick up your work from where you left it.
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Prior art goes back significantly further than any of the X based windows mangers. A number of the development enviroments at PARC had virtual displays which were significantly more powerful than what Microsoft is citing in the late 70s and early 80s.
The UI which most closely matches Microsoft claims was one called "Rooms" which appeared in a number of Xerox development environments (like Interlisp-D) in the early 1980s. The first paper I remember was in 1986 (CHI i think). Rooms permits multiple virtual screens, a "preview function" to see all your rooms, and a nice navigation to get between the "rooms". Elements of the Rooms UI was eventually turned into a UI which ran under Windows 3.1.
The first UI that I recall seeing which was related to this was the "Project" construct in Smalltalk. You can see a more advanced version of this in Squeak.
The ultimate form of this where the Views. You could have multiple viewers on one physical display at the same time, swap your screen between multiple viewers, have multiple heads displaying the save view, or move the view between machines (aka RemoteViewers) which was really useful when you went home and wanted to pick up your work from where you left it.