The Andrew User Interface System is an integrated set of tools that allow you to create, use, and mail documents and applications containing typographically formatted text and embedded objects. The system, called AUIS or "Andrew", has three principal components:

The Andrew User Environment ( AUE ) is an integrated set of applications beginning with a 'generic object' editor ( ez ), a help system, a system monitoring tool ( console ), an editor-based shell interface ( typescript ), and support for printing multi-media documents.

The Andrew Toolkit ( ATK ) is a portable user-interface toolkit. It provides a dynamically-loadable, object-oriented environment wherein objects can be embedded in one-another. Thus, one could edit text that contains not only fonts and styles, but also embedded raster images, spreadsheets, drawing editors, equations, simple animations, etc. These embedded objects could themselves contain other objects, including text. ATK is an open system so programmers can create new objects that can be embedded as easily as those system-defined objects.

The Andrew Message System ( AMS ) provides a multi-media interface to mail and bulletin-boards. AMS supports several mail management strategies and implements many advanced features including authentication, return receipts, automatic sorting of mail, vote collection and tabulation, enclosures, audit trails of related messages, and subscription management. It also provides a variety of interfaces that support ttys and low-function personal computers in addition to the high-function workstations.

Andrew has been a part of the campus computing environment of Carnegie Mellon University since 1986 and has continuously evolved to remain at the forefront of multimedia information technology. The Andrew Toolkit, release 6.3, is available free of charge via anonymous ftp at ftp.andrew.cmu.edu in the directory pub/AUIS. On the CDROM, Andrew is compiled for several of the most popular Unix platforms.