AUIS had its roots in 1982 when Carnegie Mellon University and the IBM Corporation decided to jointly develop a campus computing facility based on personal computers to replace the time-sharing system then on campus. IBM provided not only generous funding, but also some talented individuals and access to IBM development programs.

The result was a graphical user interface we know as the Andrew User Interface System and a file system, the Andrew File System. The file system formed the basis of Transarc Corporation's Distributed File System (DFS) and is as part of the Open System Foundation software.

The Andrew Consortium, composed of a number of corporations and universities, funds the current development of AUIS. AUIS is available on a wide variety of platforms including Linux, AIX, Solaris, Ultrix, HP UX as well as others.

In early June, version 6.3 of the Andrew User Interface System (AUIS) was released by the Andrew Consortium. This led to the release of several packages aimed at people interested in a word processor, a program source editor and a multi-media mail agent. You may find these packages in /pub/Linux/X11/andrew/auis63L* at sunsite.unc.edu.