From: jim@ncd.com (Jim Fulton)
Newsgroups: fj.mail-lists.x-window
Subject: Re: Why do people call it X-windowS?
Date: 2 Jan 93 03:16:31 GMT
Distribution: fj
Organization: Network Computing Devices, Mountain View, CA

Message-Id: <9301020122.AA03224@verbosa.ncd.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 93 17:22:21 PST


I tiny bit of history for this New Year:


	I think this quote is from either Jim Gettys or Bob Scheifler 
	and can be found in the X(1) man page.  

Almost.  I came up with the quote to help people (who were calling us day in
and day out; particularly the press) understand X's preferred name.  The folks
at ICS then put it on an early T-shirt (I think it might have been for the X
Technical Conference of 1989, but I can't recall exactly).  I later stuck it
into the README files for R3 and R4. 

The end result has been that just about everyone initially had a preferance
has given up.


	As to why it was called X, as opposed to something else,
	I believe there were two earlier window systems named W and V 
	that the early X development group drew upon for inspiration 
	and lessons learned. 

See Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys' book for a more thorough explanation.  W was
a window system that was originally designed for the V research project at
Stanford.  The source code was given to MIT to play with and Bob ended up
rewriting a good chunk of it.  To distinguish the result from it's predecessor,
he called his new stuff X.  We've rarely let him name anything since.  :-)

Other arcania (some of which has been posted by Jim Gettys on occasion): 

    o	For those who are obsessed with performance, it is interesting or 
	perhaps scary to note that the initial deployment of VS100s 
	(68000-based graphics coprocessors connected to the host via 
	fiber-optic cable) around Project Athena had 2-4 heads off of 
	a VAX 11/750.  Yup, I said 750.

    o	The original X demos and window manager were written in the CLU
	programming language.

    o	Some people actually used Microvax I's running X ...

    o	... and they even fought over who got to use the spiffy new 
	Microvax IIs.

    o	The first public releases of X (X.V6 in 1985) required a $100 license.
	It came with a ~30 page Xlib manual.  But, it was monochrome only.

    o	I believe the first commercial third party X application was shown 
	at the Autofact trade show in Detroit in November of 1985.  It was
	an MCAE (mechanical computer-aided engineering) from Cognition Inc.
	and used X.V9 for the demo.  Another neat feature of it was that
	it used a network-transparent protocol between the applications
	and a user interface management server which handled all of the
	X interactions.

    o	The first PC/X server was written in 1986 for the PC/AT.  It used a 
	Hitachi ACRTC-based high-res card and monitor and a tablet, making it
	probably one of the more expensive (and heavy :-) 286s around.

    o	Keith Packard, who perhaps has now touched more of the X11 server code
	than any other single individual, had to be coerced into working
	on the server.  But then, that was probably because the first task 
	was to rewrite the arc code.

    o	The SHAPE extension to X was sketched out on airplane flight back
	from a SIGGRAPH as a way of saying "I told you so" to the folks
	who insisted that non-rectangular windows were a critical flaw
	in X.  We all thought they were silly.

As with most memories, much of the prehistory of X is fading into oblivion.

Probably for the best.  :-)

Jim


%%% overflow headers %%%
To: ejw1@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Eric Weidl),
        stumpf@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Markus Stumpf),
        dnh@mfltd.co.uk (Des Herriott), jh@efd.lth.se (Joergen Haegg),
        bernward@moepi.do.open.de (Bernward Averwald),
        mccoy@gothamcity.jsc.nasa.gov (Daniel J. McCoy),
        bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral),
        chrise@atc.boeing.com (Chris Esposito pierce),
        rlh@ukc.ac.uk (R.L.Hesketh), erik@westworld.esd.sgi.com (Erik Fortune),
        dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks),
        william@bourbon.cs.ucla.edu (William Cheng), bvh@cse.unl.edu (Obi-Wan)
%%% end overflow headers %%%