The Unix-Haters Handbook was published in 1994, two years before the Open Group was founded in 1996, three years before they took over the X-Window system in 1997, five years before the formation of X.org, and ten years after X-Windows was released in 1984. XFree86 was not very widely used in 1994, most people were running the original X server on non-x86 and RISC workstations at the time (Sun SPARC, SGI MIPS, DEC Microvax and Alpha, HP PA-RISC, NCD X-Terminal, etc). The Open Group had absolutely nothing to do with the design of the X11 protocol, the server implementation, or XLib.

I've quite frequently written about X11, NeWS, Wayland, window management, HyperCard, web browsers, and user interface toolkits on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030

marcodiego on Nov 3, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (...

Hi DonHopkins!

Would you mind to share your opinion on Wayland with us?

DonHopkins on Nov 4, 2021 [–]

Thanks for asking! Hold my bong. ;)

[...lots more at the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 ]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502320

DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–]

(An excerpt from another longer reply I just posted):

From: npg@East (Neil Groundwater - Sun Consulting)
Date: Wed, Jun 27, 1990
Subject: Humor from Dennis Ritchie (at USENIX)

(Actually Dennis's latter remark was attributed by him to Rob Pike)

from Unix Today 6/25 page 5.

"..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium
a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die. "He
was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still
sucks."

http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1332...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502385

DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: The X-Windows Disaster (1994)

The window system needs to be displayed somehow too. What works for the window system works for the browser too. There's no need for an additional layer of widow system once you have a browser that can draw on the screen itself. A web browser can make a much better scriptable window manager / desktop environment all by itself, than anything that's possible with X-Windows.

code_duck on March 6, 2020 [–]

The comment I replied to said that X and Wayland were being overrun by web apps, which doesn't make any sense at all.

NB as this article reminds us, there is no system called X- Windows.

DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent [–]

If you want to be pedantic, I didn't call it "X- Windows". I called it "X-Windows". Nobody ever puts a space between the "X-" and the "Windows". The title of the article we're discussing that I wrote and named uses the term "X-Windows" because I specifically told the editors of the book to spell the name that way on purpose, to annoy X fanatics. That fact was stated in the last sentence of the article.

So what is there about drawing on the screen and handling input events and handling network requests that a window system can do, but a web browser can't? Why does there need to be a window system, if you already have a web browser?

Does you phone have a web browser? Does it also have a window system too? How often do you open and close icons and move and resize windows around on your phone, compared to how often you browse the web on your phone? Name one thing a window system can do that a web browser can't these days.

For example, is this a web browser or a window system?

https://www.windows93.net/

You should read up on the history of window management and alternative designs for window systems and interactive graphical user interfaces. Things weren't always the way they are now, and there are many different ways of doing things, that are a hell of a lot better than the status quo. Back before everybody blindly imitated Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft because they didn't know any better and never experienced anything different, there were a lot of interesting original ideas. But now everybody's into Cargo Cult programming and interface design, blindly imitating shallow surface appearances and over-reacting to the latest trendy craze (like flat design) that was an over-reaction to the previous trendy craze (like skeuomorphism), without ever looking deeper into the reasons, or god forbid scientific studies and research and user testing, or further back than a few months into the past, and never understanding why things are the way they are, or how and why they got to be that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/02/cargo-cult-use...

To illustrate my point, and lead you to enlightenment (and I don't mean the Enlightenment window manager):

Here is one of Gosling's earlier papers about NeWS (originally called "SunDew"), published in 1985 at an Alvey Workshop, and the next year in an excellent Springer Verlag book called "Methodology of Window Management" that is now available online for free. [1]

Chapter 5: SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System, by James Gosling [2]

Another interesting chapter is Warren Teitelman's "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View". [3]

Also, the Architecture Working Group Discussion [4] and Final Report [5], and the API Task Group [6] have a treasure trove of interesting and prescient discussion between some amazing people.

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

Methodology of Window Management

F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams

29 April 1985

This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme.

The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986.

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

5. SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System

James Gosling

SunDew is a distributed, extensible window system that is currently being developed at SUN. It has arisen out of an effort to step back and examine various window system issues without the usual product development constraints. It should really be viewed as speculative research into the right way to build a window system. We started out by looking at a number of window systems and clients of window systems, and came up with a set of goals. From those goals, and a little bit of inspiration, we came up with a design.

[...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499501

sicnus on March 5, 2020 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Oh, I wanna hop in on this train. tell that fool to man X yo. ;)

I've been getting pissed about people calling it "X Windows" since 1995 so there.

DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–]

You made my day! I'm so delighted to hear you're pissed that people call it X-Windows. ;) Thank you for letting me know my long term project of always calling it X-Windows worked perfectly as planned. I've been systematically calling it X-Windows to piss people off since June 1988, when I read the article "Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’" in my copy of Volume 1 Number 2 of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group” (which I quoted above):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380

From the end of the X-Windows Disaster article:

>Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title.

[...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501360

DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent | prev | next [–]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:

- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.

- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502125

DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | prev | next [–]

Bill Joy referred to X-Windows as "Rasterop on Wheels".

I gave a NeWS/Pie Menus/HyperTies/Emacs demo to Steve Jobs once, on the trade show floor at the Educom conference, right after he finally released the NeXT Machine, in November of 1988.

Sun was letting me demo NeWS and the stuff we were developing at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a workstation at their booth, and NeXT's booth was right across the aisle, so Ben Shneiderman rope-a-doped him and dragged him over for a demo. He jumped up and down and yelled "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat. That sucks!"

I figure a 3:1 sucks:neat ratio was pretty good for him comparing something different than his newborn baby NeXT Step, which critics had taken to calling NeVR Step, since it had been vaporware for so long until then.

When I tried to explain to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"

Here's Ben's account (I love how he gently put it that "Jobs had little patience with the academic side of things" -- and by "engage" he meant "jump up and down and yell"):

Date: Tue, 1 Nov 88 07:55:48 EST
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
To: hcil@tove.umd.edu
Subject: steve jobs visit

I just couldn't resist telling this story....

On Tuesday I was at the EDUCOM conference in DC and Steve Jobs was showing
NeXT...I was quite impressed...a nice step forward, improving, refining
and developing good ideas. I invited him to see our Hyperties SUN version
that we were showing at the SUN booth. The gang managed to get the new
NeWS version working and the Space Telescope looked great...Jobs spent
about a half hour with us going from positive comments such as "Great!"
to "That sucks"...he had a terrific sensitivity to the user interface
issues and could articulate his reasons wonderfully.

On Wednesday he came out to the lab and spent time looking at a few more
of our demos...the students (and me too) were delighted to have him as
a visitor.

What impresses me is that he took his ideas and really put them to work...
pushing back the frontier a bit further. His system really works and
has much attractive in the hardware and software domains. Jobs had little
patience with the academic side of things, but was very ready to engage
over interface issues.

Do check out NeXT...there are things to criticize, but I did come away
more impressed and pleased than ready to pick at the flaws.

-- Ben