Yes...this is one of the key innovations that X had that probably isn't so useful now. Efficient use of memory was critical. In the mid-1990s, low end Sun's c

Yes...this is one of the key innovations that X had that probably isn't so useful now. Efficient use of memory was critical. In the mid-1990s, low end Sun's could actually ship as a supported config with 24-bit video and as little as 20MB of memory (16M system ram + 4M vsimm) like the the SX/CG14 in the SS20. There were 24-bit cards for earlier, mc68k Suns that could run in even less, but were more for rendering and of questionable utility for interactive use. Another thing this efficiency allowed was the X Terminal. It was something akin the a serial terminal but running X, modest processor and memory, diskless (some had floppies for file transfer), usually running a couple of built-in local clients (xclock, etc), and costing far less than a full workstation. Most of them I recall being either monochrome or 8-bit color, but around this time I had an NCD X Terminal with 24-bit graphics, a MIPS processor and 16M ram + 8M vram, and network (streaming) audio for about a fraction the cost of an SGI Indy. Nice machine.