Sorry for wasting your precious time, but the point of the article was to publish the entire discussion thread so it was easy to read in one place, including some previously unpublished private email discussion, and a citation to the classic "A Clipping Divider" paper, as well as David Rosenthal's correction and comments to some mistakes in Alan Kay's Quora answer, and Alan Kay's correction and comments to some mistakes in Warren Teitelman's article "Ten Years of Window Systems — A Retrospective View" from Methodology of Window Management, and to cite David Rosenthal's blog posting "History of Window Systems" in which he goes into much more detail in response to Alan's original Quora answer.

Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View, by
Warren Teitelman:

http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...

A Clipping Divider, by Robert F. Sproull and Ivan E. Sutherland:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687

I think a better title of this discussion would be simply "History of Window Systems", which is the title of David's blog posting that I linked to at the end, if you made it that far.

Alan Kay thanked David Rosenthal for writing up that History of Window Systems: "Your blog is a real addition to the history and context needed to really understand and criticize and improve today."

Or did you get that far? I guess if you didn't make it past the first 50 characters of the title, you probably didn't make it to the end where all the good stuff is.

DSHR's Blog: History of Window Systems:

https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html

>History Of Window Systems: Alan Kay's "Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?" makes important points about the architecture of the infrastructure for user interfaces, but also sparked comments and an email exchange that clarified the early history of window systems. This is something I've written about previously, so below the fold I go into considerable detail. [...]

Also, David Rosenthal previously posted to Reddit in 23 years ago in 2000 to correct some misleading comments other people posted:

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5311&cid=1075535

>I'm Dave Rosenthal. I worked on window systems for a long time. I was one of
the authors of the Andrew window system, and NeWS. I did the first port of
the X Window System to non-DEC hardware and was one of the team that got X11
release 1 out the door.

>This comment has good references, all worth reading. The Methodology of Window
Management book is the record of a workshop in 4/85 - it has a lot of pointers
to work further back, in particular a paper called "Ten Years of Window
Systems" by Warren Teitelman, who was at PARC and then ran the Windows group
at Sun. This describes many of the early window systems at PARC.

>I'm not going to try to write a complete history, but I do want to correct
several misleading statements in the comments to this post. There were
several streams of development which naturally influenced each other- broadly:

>- Libraries supporting multiple windows from one or more threads in
a single address space, starting from Smalltalk leading to the Mac
and Windows environments.

>- Kernel window systems supporting access to multiple windows from
multiple address spaces on a single machine, starting with the Blit
and leading to SunWindows and a system for the Whitechapel MG-1.

>- Network window systems supporting access to multiple windows from
multiple address spaces on multiple machines via a network, starting
from work at PARC by Bob Sproull & (if memory serves) Elaine
Sonderegger, leading to Andrew, SunDew which became NeWS, and W
which became X.

>Gosling & I & others at C-MU's Information Technology Center wrote the Andrew
window system. We were all post-docs by then, not students. My memory
is that it was working OK in the spring of '84.

>NeWS was not based on Display Postscript. Gosling built a completely
independent (and much faster) implementation of PostScript from the
specification that Adobe published as a book. This was SunDew. It was
never a fully functional window system. NeWS was a ground-up re-write
of SunDew, adding extensive multi-threading and garbage collection to
the PostScript clone. My memory is that it was working pretty well by
the summer of '86.

>Early versions of X were specific to bizarre DEC hardware. While I was
working on NeWS at Sun I also did the first port of X10 to non-DEC
hardware - to Sun 1,2 & 3 workstations. Experience from this and later
ports of X10 was a major input to the redesign that resulted in X11,
and this careful design has led to reasonably easy porting to X11 to a
wide range of hardware.

>I'm not going to comment on the politics which have surrounded window
systems, except to say that an individual's rankings of the importance
of different technical, aesthetic or licensing features are no more than
an individual's views. The market's view of the same features can be
quite different without the operation of conspiracies or malign forces.
It may simply be that the majority of customers don't agree with your
priorities.

Original reddit discussion of "What GUIs Came Before X11?":

https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/04/1321234/what-guis-came-b...