4 ms·

> X11 just seems too janky to work over a really remote connection. Surely It is. But I cannot forget how magic it seemed in the 80s doing titan$ export DI

by twsted 11y ago

> X11 just seems too janky to work over a really remote connection. Surely It is. But I cannot forget how magic it seemed in the 80s doing titan$ export DISPLAY=zeus:0.0; xeyes & over slow serial lines.

arethuza 11y ago
I cringe to think that I used to use xhost to allow access from any client - don't think there were many firewalls on JANET so anybody could have been connecting to the Sun (later DEC Alpha) I used.
pantulis 11y ago
And the next thing would be something like zeus$ xhost + ;)
gpvos 11y ago
xmeltdown
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  Jeremy Huxtable made the original "Big Brother" NeWS version of eyes [1], which inspired xeyes at SIGGRAPH '88 [2], and he also made the NeWS version of melt [3], in just 30 lines of code! My favorite OpenWindows demo was Pat Lashley's monaeyes [4], of course. And I made a fancy version of eyeball windows for The NeWS Toolkit [5] to show off its drag-n-drop and nested window management capabilities, where the eyeball was the window frame, and the iris was the client window, and you could split them in two, and even drag and drop eyes inside of each other, so that sub-eye window frame was reparented inside the moving super-eye client iris! The effect was very creepy and CPU intensive, and I could never quite talk the OPEN LOOK folks into adopting them into the standard. [1] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.... [2] http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xeyes.1.html http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xeyes.1.html [3] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.ps.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.p... [4] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/monaeyes.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/monaeyes.txt [5] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/eyes.ps.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/eyes.ps.txt
kjs3 11y ago
I ran X over a 128Kbps ISDN line for years. I thought it was pretty usable, as long as you were a bit careful about what you ran over it. XTerms were fine; things like Framemaker were painful.
tracker1 11y ago
Agreed, and in the days of simpler apps, and 800x600/1024x768 displays being more usual, not as bad. I really do miss a lot of this. I mean, the web is great for a lot of stuff (as I said)... but I feel it is a shame that we don't have a modern alternative for client/server applications... and every time I see one that has a lot of potential, it usually has some strings that will prevent adoption.

by twsted 11y ago

arethuza 11y ago

I cringe to think that I used to use xhost to allow access from any client - don't think there were many firewalls on JANET so anybody could have been connecting to the Sun (later DEC Alpha) I used.

pantulis 11y ago

And the next thing would be something like zeus$ xhost + ;)

gpvos 11y ago

xmeltdown

DonHopkins 11y ago
Jeremy Huxtable made the original "Big Brother" NeWS version of eyes [1], which inspired xeyes at SIGGRAPH '88 [2], and he also made the NeWS version of melt [3], in just 30 lines of code! My favorite OpenWindows demo was Pat Lashley's monaeyes [4], of course. And I made a fancy version of eyeball windows for The NeWS Toolkit [5] to show off its drag-n-drop and nested window management capabilities, where the eyeball was the window frame, and the iris was the client window, and you could split them in two, and even drag and drop eyes inside of each other, so that sub-eye window frame was reparented inside the moving super-eye client iris! The effect was very creepy and CPU intensive, and I could never quite talk the OPEN LOOK folks into adopting them into the standard. [1] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.... [2] http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xeyes.1.html http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xeyes.1.html [3] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.ps.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.p... [4] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/monaeyes.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/monaeyes.txt [5] http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/eyes.ps.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/eyes.ps.txt

kjs3 11y ago

I ran X over a 128Kbps ISDN line for years. I thought it was pretty usable, as long as you were a bit careful about what you ran over it. XTerms were fine; things like Framemaker were painful.

tracker1 11y ago

Agreed, and in the days of simpler apps, and 800x600/1024x768 displays being more usual, not as bad. I really do miss a lot of this. I mean, the web is great for a lot of stuff (as I said)... but I feel it is a shame that we don't have a modern alternative for client/server applications... and every time I see one that has a lot of potential, it usually has some strings that will prevent adoption.