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I have been using X-Windows in that timeframe - on VMS workstations. The biggest problem was indeed, that X-Windows mostly was a place to run xterms on. But the

by _ph_ 7y ago

I have been using X-Windows in that timeframe - on VMS workstations. The biggest problem was indeed, that X-Windows mostly was a place to run xterms on. But there were a few native GUI applicatons and they were quite nice. The biggest problem was, that Motiv wasn't freely available. You had to pay license costs. If not for that, "Unix on the desktop" might have actually happened. And as the time progressed, Motiv wasn't unbearably slow any more.

donio 7y ago
I remember those days too, the lack of a good GUI toolkit felt like such a big deal. Funny that nowadays I find myself using applications that don't use a UI toolkit, Emacs (compiled without toolkit), st, mupdf, games that do their own UI. The only application I have running that uses GTK is chromium.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  The point I was trying to make was, that there were too few gui applications at all, most of the application I was running were just terminal applications. A widely available GUI toolkit might have helped this. The funniest example was a chemical database software, which would be VT100 based running inside an xterm, but for graphical input/output would spawn a separate window based on X toolkit graphics. But beyond that, those expensive workstations (like $20k in todays money) were mostly running xterm. While being technically widely superior to the PCs of that time - there were also Win3.1 machines around, running a dreadful VT100 emulation - they made little out of it, because there was so little software. So they were eventually replaced with PCs at a fraction of the price. Ironically, even if it were the times of Linux 1.0, I suggested they should run Linux, as they would get excellent X Windows support, unfortunately the suggestion wasn't taken upon.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Thank you for calling it X-Windows! ;)
- DrScump 7y ago
  I remember it being stressed to me: "don't call it 'X-Windows'. It is 'X', or 'The X Window System', if you must." This was in an environment where upper management wanted to take away the desktop workstations from non-developers in favor of X terminals. "We move all that work to the server now; You don't need all that expense on all these desks. Server-side is the future." Good freaking luck if you were Tech Support or QA. The fun part: we were spending as much on the X terminals and supporting equipment as we could get more Sparcstations for at our great corporate rate (my desktop was on its third generation by then). Unsurprisingly, this was merely an early checkpoint in what became a tailspin.

by _ph_ 7y ago

donio 7y ago

I remember those days too, the lack of a good GUI toolkit felt like such a big deal. Funny that nowadays I find myself using applications that don't use a UI toolkit, Emacs (compiled without toolkit), st, mupdf, games that do their own UI. The only application I have running that uses GTK is chromium.

_ph_ 7y ago
The point I was trying to make was, that there were too few gui applications at all, most of the application I was running were just terminal applications. A widely available GUI toolkit might have helped this. The funniest example was a chemical database software, which would be VT100 based running inside an xterm, but for graphical input/output would spawn a separate window based on X toolkit graphics. But beyond that, those expensive workstations (like $20k in todays money) were mostly running xterm. While being technically widely superior to the PCs of that time - there were also Win3.1 machines around, running a dreadful VT100 emulation - they made little out of it, because there was so little software. So they were eventually replaced with PCs at a fraction of the price. Ironically, even if it were the times of Linux 1.0, I suggested they should run Linux, as they would get excellent X Windows support, unfortunately the suggestion wasn't taken upon.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Thank you for calling it X-Windows! ;)

DrScump 7y ago
I remember it being stressed to me: "don't call it 'X-Windows'. It is 'X', or 'The X Window System', if you must." This was in an environment where upper management wanted to take away the desktop workstations from non-developers in favor of X terminals. "We move all that work to the server now; You don't need all that expense on all these desks. Server-side is the future." Good freaking luck if you were Tech Support or QA. The fun part: we were spending as much on the X terminals and supporting equipment as we could get more Sparcstations for at our great corporate rate (my desktop was on its third generation by then). Unsurprisingly, this was merely an early checkpoint in what became a tailspin.