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> its incredible longevity I get your point, but see it completely differently as GUI programmer. X was steaming pile of s*t. Its "longlevity" was spend clea

> its incredible longevity I get your point, but see it completely differently as GUI programmer. X was steaming pile of s*t. Its "longlevity" was spend cleaning up the mess. Designers had this stupid idea to do drawing over remote connection, and produced broken design around that. Direct memory access, DRI, OpenGL, screen buffers... Non of that was part of X, but is vitally necessary for GUI. There is no compatibility in X server design. Good luck running remote X session today. Everyone uses VNC.

nitrogen 7y ago
Apart from thin clients, X remote display has historically been used for combining applications from multiple systems on a single display. Those systems could be computers, lab hardware, or anything else.
- gnufx 7y ago
  Indeed, over 25+ years that I've known, and I'd be surrounded by that in the office, not VNC (but some X2go). The single rubbish X server I've known is (or was) Xceed (or however it's spelt) which people inexplicably used rather than Cygwin's; the first question to ask someone with classes of Emacs problems was whether they were using it.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Or the other way around: multiplexing one X11 application across multiple displays. On the Usenix trade show floor one year, somebody made a horse racing client that opened connections on multiple X11 servers, and animated horses racing from screen to screen. Many different companies with X11 workstations or terminals were running it at the same time, and horses were running between different brands of computers on the trade show floor, which made a nice point! (About network race conditions ;) It was just black and white, and the graphics were dead simple, so it worked great on everybody's hardware. Multi Player SimCityNet was implemented in TCL/Tk on X11, which supported opening multiple X11 servers at the same time, even with different kinds of displays, and using shared memory if running locally. Of course there was a limit to how many people could play at once, and it required a reasonably fast network, and every player had to grant full access to their server to the client. And anyone could type TCL expressions into the chat window and hit escape to execute them, so it probably wasn't very secure, and certainly was easy to cheat: "sim Funds 9999999<esc>" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-announcement.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno... https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcitynet.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcitynet.h... >SimCityNet: a Cooperative Multi User City Simulation >SimCityNet is an animated interactive system simulation game, providing a set of rules and tools for planning and building a complex dynamic simulated city. Several people on different workstations can participate in the same game, cooperating and coordinating their actions over the net. Working together, you can zone land use, hook up the power grid, build roads, bridges, parks and stadiums, raise taxes, and even summon disasters, causing the city to grow and thrive, or crumble and die. SimCityNet features multiple city views and maps with overlays, simultaneous editing and user interface interaction, "voting panels" for group decision making, and multimedia communication and annotation features ("bridges between players"). >The multi user interface supports communication via three media in parallel: text, sound, and graphics. It includes a scrolling text log for telegram messages, a networked audio server for sound effects and voice intercom, and shared cursors and graphical overlays for pointing, gesturing, annotating and editing the map.
  - iso-8859-1 7y ago
    is the demo still available for download somewhere? the FTP link on that page is broken.
gnufx 7y ago
We had effective direct-manipulation GUIs long before OpenGL, so that can't be it, though we did have DMA and graphics buffers in the '80s and DRI wasn't relevant.

nitrogen 7y ago

Apart from thin clients, X remote display has historically been used for combining applications from multiple systems on a single display. Those systems could be computers, lab hardware, or anything else.

gnufx 7y ago
Indeed, over 25+ years that I've known, and I'd be surrounded by that in the office, not VNC (but some X2go). The single rubbish X server I've known is (or was) Xceed (or however it's spelt) which people inexplicably used rather than Cygwin's; the first question to ask someone with classes of Emacs problems was whether they were using it.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Or the other way around: multiplexing one X11 application across multiple displays. On the Usenix trade show floor one year, somebody made a horse racing client that opened connections on multiple X11 servers, and animated horses racing from screen to screen. Many different companies with X11 workstations or terminals were running it at the same time, and horses were running between different brands of computers on the trade show floor, which made a nice point! (About network race conditions ;) It was just black and white, and the graphics were dead simple, so it worked great on everybody's hardware. Multi Player SimCityNet was implemented in TCL/Tk on X11, which supported opening multiple X11 servers at the same time, even with different kinds of displays, and using shared memory if running locally. Of course there was a limit to how many people could play at once, and it required a reasonably fast network, and every player had to grant full access to their server to the client. And anyone could type TCL expressions into the chat window and hit escape to execute them, so it probably wasn't very secure, and certainly was easy to cheat: "sim Funds 9999999<esc>" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-announcement.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno... https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcitynet.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcitynet.h... >SimCityNet: a Cooperative Multi User City Simulation >SimCityNet is an animated interactive system simulation game, providing a set of rules and tools for planning and building a complex dynamic simulated city. Several people on different workstations can participate in the same game, cooperating and coordinating their actions over the net. Working together, you can zone land use, hook up the power grid, build roads, bridges, parks and stadiums, raise taxes, and even summon disasters, causing the city to grow and thrive, or crumble and die. SimCityNet features multiple city views and maps with overlays, simultaneous editing and user interface interaction, "voting panels" for group decision making, and multimedia communication and annotation features ("bridges between players"). >The multi user interface supports communication via three media in parallel: text, sound, and graphics. It includes a scrolling text log for telegram messages, a networked audio server for sound effects and voice intercom, and shared cursors and graphical overlays for pointing, gesturing, annotating and editing the map.
- iso-8859-1 7y ago
  is the demo still available for download somewhere? the FTP link on that page is broken.

gnufx 7y ago

We had effective direct-manipulation GUIs long before OpenGL, so that can't be it, though we did have DMA and graphics buffers in the '80s and DRI wasn't relevant.