THE HISTORY
 
 
The XmComboBox widget project once started out some day in the early spring of '93. Right here in our cute and tiny "Institute of Geometry and Applied Mathematics" we're using a lot of IRIS Indigos running IRIX 4.0.5 and Motif 1.1. When I figured out that Motif 1.2 won't have a ComboBox widget but I badly needed one I started to wrote one myself. Although there was some rumour that Motif 2.0 should provide a ComboBox I won't wait till infinity. To be honest: this was going to be my second widget I ever wrote. And I wouldn't do this kind of programming once more with that little knowledge of Motif! 

But as we like to say in German: "Dat Glück is' mit die Dummen" (a roughly translation would be "stupid people always have luck"). The widget constantly growed and worked just fine. I first used it within a graphical frontend to the zip and unzip packing programs. 

In december '93 I stumbled across some postings in comp.windows.x.motif. There were some people who asked for the source of a ComboBox widget. But up to this time there wasn't any source available for such a widget. So I asked my boss and he agreed to make the source of my ComboBox widget available to the public. But first I had to tie up some loose ends in the source and wrote the documentation. And then I put the source on our campus server right here in Aachen (a really nice town with a lot of history: coronation of Charles the Great in 800), posted a short message to comp.windows.x.motif and went away for the weekend. 

Back again on monday the first congratulations had arrived -- for me this was a quite new but really encourageing experience. Until the end of the same week we had counted more than 70 downloads and after three weeks there were over 150s! Even someone at microsoft.com had downloaded the source. Unluckily, I couldn't figure out whether it was our special friend Billy "TroubleSpace". 

The ComboBox widget is now more than a year old and many people have contributed tips and suggestions. Especially I want to thank Chris Marotz (email: chris_marotz@itd.sterling.com) who had taken the part of proofreading the english documentation and testing the code before is put on the ftp server. And I want to thank the OSF -- without it there would have never been such a **** (warning: censored by server during upload) toolkit like Motif. (Please fill in accordingly!) And I simply wouldn't have someone to shout at. 


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Contents: Harald Albrecht (albrecht@igpm.rwth-aachen.de) 
Layout: Harald Albrecht 
Last Change: 97/08/10 (ab)