Finally, we'll go through the basic Motif programming principles. The X Window System, or simply X, was originally developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with support from Digital Equipment Corporation. X was developed for Project Athena to fulfill the project's need for a distributed, hardware-independent user interface platform. X is a graphics system used primarily on UNIX systems. It provides a way of writing device-independent graphical and windowing software that can be ported easily from one machine to another.
X provides functionality via a vast set of subroutine libraries.
These may be called from a variety of high-level languages. However, they are most easily called from C programs. Clients and Servers Concept Since X is network-oriented, the applications developed for it do not need to run on the same system as the one supporting the display. The programmer doesn't need to worry much about the practicality of this, as X normally makes this transparent to the user. The server is the program that controls the display.