This seems interesting. I couldn't find anything on Collage, other than a note in a German SINIX manual [1] to the extent that this was a GUI used by Siemens before they switched to X Windows and OSF/Motif.
Does anyone know, if there is any documentation out there, or maybe even screenshots?
I never knew this was a thing. I compared the kernel (like, actually reading and comparing the disassembly) between SINIX 1.0 and SINIX 1.2, and I noticed that in 1.2 a significant amount of kernel code for graphics support was added. I did wonder what that was for.
Now I'm super intrigued that there may actually be a GUI for the PC-D/X[1] out there!
I'm pretty sure the installation of SINIX 1.2 does not have that, it probably came on extra diskettes, but now I really want to double check.
[1] The machine was basically called PC-D when running DOS, and PC-X when running SINIX. That's not technically true for the first revisions of the boards (where e.g. the MMU was an optional card), but all PC-Ds I remember seeing even had "PC-D/X" written on their backside already.
EDIT: That book you linked seems to be for the SVR4 SINIX that came after the XENIX-based PC-D SINIX. By that time, from what I could tell from other research so far, SINIX was running on NS32032, not on 186.
The 97801 was only a - very nice and ergonomic - serial text terminal (some models were VT220 compatible), but it was commonly used with SINIX systems. It seems that Siemens provided a 97801 emulator for Collage (https://www.computerwoche.de/a/siemens-macht-sich-mit-collag...).
If I understand correctly the docs we found, there were 3 "flavors": "Grafik-COLLAGE", "Alpha-COLLAGE", and "X-COLLAGE". I assume the first would be for some sort of clever terminal, the second for non-graphical terminals, and the last one for X servers.
At the time I thought it was odd that the windows ended up aligning at character cell borders, which would indicate a terminal with some form of redefinable character set.
No, thank you! This is something I didn't even know existed, and now I'm very curious to find out more. Although chances are slim, maybe that software turns up somewhere someday (it would be brilliant if it's on one of the machines I got, since except for the one that was my own in the 80s, I did not get to even see them yet--shipping them over the ocean would not just have been expensive, but risky, too).
Of course. I found some other stuff in the 1.2 kernel by the way, like the existence of (relatively smart, apparently) network and serial multiplexer cards for the PC-X.
I also reverse engineered how the NMI worked, details about the MMU etc.
Does anyone know, if there is any documentation out there, or maybe even screenshots?
[1] "UNIX für den kommerziellen Einsatz: Die SINIX-Anwendungsumgebung" ed. John J. Abbott (Carl Hanser Verlag München Wien, 1993), PDF-copy: http://oldcomputers-ddns.org/public/pub/rechner/siemens/mx-r...