Most Unix software written at Cabletron uses X/Motif as an interface to the user. Motif menus are notoriously difficult to work with, so we wrote a layer around them for our use. This menu manager gave us the flexibility to add floating menus long before OSF supported them, and let us generalize the menus away from views and devices. When a model was selected in a particular view, the menu manager knew where its model-specific menu entries went.

The initial version (The Menu Manager) was written before my time. I co-wrote the second version (Son of Menu Manager). The third version (yes, Bride of Menu Manager) was written from scratch by me, and used external configuration files to build and customize the menu, so individual users could customize the menus to their own needs.