16 ms·

Window System X (1984)

263 points by marcodiego 5y ago

mellosouls 5y ago
(1984)
shmerl 5y ago
Interesting to see the origins of X. Were there really 10 versions before it got to X11 and why did the version stop there?
- paulrouget 5y ago
  11 is the protocol version. With multiple implementations. I think once extensions were introduced, they probably didn't need to extend the protocol.
- bboreham 5y ago
  Yes. 11 is the version of the protocol, which didn’t change fundamentally after X11, so they moved to X11R2, R3, etc., and adding extensions.
- indeyets 5y ago
  It happened really fast. X1 happened in may 1984, x6 in 1985 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Origin_and_early_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Origin_and_ear...
- djur 5y ago
  Yes. There were a number of rapidly developed versions up to X10 in 1986, which was the first one released under a free license (and thus the first one widely adopted). X11 was an overhaul of X10 intended to increase portability/compatibility, and also the first version developed as a community open source project rather than internally to MIT. That came out in 1987. As for why X11 was the last major version: the protocol has remained backwards compatible since then. Clients created decades ago can still operate with modern X servers. It's pretty cool! http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...
- peter303 5y ago
  Similar to HTML: a lot of early evolution in the early releases. Then a long wait for version 5. Version 4 had a lot of neat stuff like math typesetting. Html balkanized during the commercial browser wars. Tim made a valiant effort to hold it together these past decades.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
checkyoursudo 5y ago
It is interesting that something 'not the ultimate window system' can last almost 40 years already, though it also seems like Wayland is getting close to critical mass of adoption?
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  Wayland is getting close, and is very good indeed, but X is still the default window system. I feel like there are a lot of technologies that are this way. They were not designed to be the best, but good enough, and they have passed the test of time.
  - a-dub 5y ago
    i have a hard time liking wayland because they're taking away remoting, which was one of my favorite parts of x.
    - johnny22 5y ago
      waypipe is one solution in that realm (i haven't used it myself though). but it's not like x servers and clients will stop working.
      - colonwqbang 5y ago
        Once wayland gets good adoption, people will gradually stop supporting X. That is how it always works in software.
    - sprash 5y ago
      Personally I like the modularity of X11 because it has a lot of standardized interfaces. For example, you can exchange the window manager and the compositing manager at runtime without affecting any running programs. In my opinion X12 should be even more modular and should have even more standardized interfaces. E.g. window decorations should not be tied to a window manager. There should be a standardized way to do toolkits/widgets where the backend and rendering can be swapped at runtime. It should be possible to run headless GUI programs that can be attached and reattached to any running instance of a display server. So kind of the opposite of what Wayland is doing.
paulrouget 5y ago
The implementation of Scheifler' X window system for IBM/Intel was called X386, which eventually was forked and freed. It was renamed XFree86, as a pun. Then was renamed Xorg. There were a few implementations of X for different unixes. Mostly closed source. It was very buggy, and patches were posted online, under the form a LD_PRELOAD-ed libraries. iirc, I had to preload a few libraries to work around the HPUX X implementation to be capable of running Mozilla Suite. Fun times :)
- pengaru 5y ago
  > It was renamed XFree86, as a pun. Then was renamed Xorg. It wasn't simply renamed Xorg, that's yet another fork after XFree86 development became stagnant and the license changed to something GPL-incompatible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86#2002:_Growing_dissent_within_the_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86#2002:_Growing_dissent_...
- p_l 5y ago
  One issue is that while some vendors went out of their way to update and modernize the internals of their X11 implementations (most famously Xsgi, which afaik ripped out all graphic driver code due to being unsuitable), Xfree86 in many ways stuck to original code, even if certain advances were made (pluggability, loadable drivers, etc.). Which unfortunately led to more and more problems that were papered over with XShm and drawing on client side, finally leading to Wayland...
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    > Which unfortunately led to more and more problems that were papered over with XShm and drawing on client side, finally leading to Wayland... But that ship hasn't totally sailed right? It's not as if Wayland was the amazing tech everybody hoped for and jumped to. Wayland is old by now, it's only half a success and many of us are still using Xorg. I'm not saying that in two decades Xorg may not be gone for good but at the moment Wayland and Xorg still coexist.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  Thank you, that was entirely new history for me. From Wikipedia: > MGR featured overlapped [...] windows and [...]. Took a while to see the strength of tiling window managers.
taubek 5y ago
My first encounter with graphics on UNIX was in 1994 or 1995. It was CDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment. Before that I've used GEOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) on Commodore 64 :)
- pantulis 5y ago
  For me it was OpenWindows, I believe running on SunOS 4.x
  - taubek 5y ago
    I remember that when I got my first gig as sys admin we've had two SGI workstations. I think that they were SGI Indigo2 workstations.
    - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
      We had some SGI workstation running in a prepress print environment because Leonardo was the only software that could handle the amount data. Amazing little machines.
- glandium 5y ago
  Mine was in 95 on NCD X Terminals, machines that would only have a X server. ISTR they automatically were getting a Window Manager and a Terminal from a central VMS server. We'd then telnet to another VMS server, where we'd access a mailbox via CLI, or the web with Mosaic. There were also other SunOS or Linux servers for various purposes. The rooms where the terminals were had something like 20 terminals, and sometimes we fooled around by making things appear in sequence on each of them, as though they were moving from one to the next, which you could do from one of the servers, whuch would connect to each terminal in sequence (the good old days of all ports being freely accessible)
  - taubek 5y ago
ar7hur 5y ago
"Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape."
- miohtama 5y ago
  80s was the golden era of hackers.
- hoyd 5y ago
  how many did go and got the code on tape?
  - peter303 5y ago
    Since I was at Stanford then, I downloaded it on sunet.
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Oh, look at this guy everyone, with his fancy "downloading".
drzaiusapelord 5y ago
I wonder how those email addresses worked. Who or what is window@athena? Project Athena is from MIT, so maybe window is a shared account for the group or window is a proto newgroup? Also its so odd to think that the code couldn't be emailed because of size limitations of the time and you'd have to bring a tape. Weird that he didn't ask for a floppy because floppies were common by then too. Lets remember in 1984 you had the original Mac and a year out from the Amiga so not exactly ancient history and both those devices supported the newer 3.5" disks with 5.25" disks being very common by then. I'm guessing the unix big iron culture of the time was primarily tape based. Also talk about a missed opportunity. I'd love to see a screenshot of this email on the original x. I'm guessing there was no email client for x back then but it could at least be read in a terminal window. I'm assuming x supported a terminal window this early if it had a working windows manager, but maybe vt100 emulation wasn't in the cards just yet. Still, what a neat piece of computer history. Stuff like this always gives me warm feelings, like in a past life I was somehow active in the culture then and feel nostalgia for it.
- bdn_ 5y ago
  > I wonder how those email addresses worked. Who or what is window@athena? Project Athena is from MIT, so maybe window is a shared account for the group or window is a proto newgroup? The history of email standards is interesting, to say the least! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rjsw 5y ago
  The source wouldn't fit on a single floppy disk.
- Inhibit 5y ago
  It doesn't mention which kind of tape. I'd be interested to know what they used. Also it looks like they're referring to the VS100. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation I never had access to those but I'd conjecture from the post they might've used tape. There at least.
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Did anyone ever get around to writing documentation?
- jeffrallen 5y ago
  Tim O'Reilly published some books on it. /s
  - ajross 5y ago
    The real cognoscenti bought the DEC Press books instead, actually. The O'Reilly things looked great on a bookshelf (I still have my set!), but Scheifler/Gettys what was we actually used when we wanted to look something up. And indeed, these were all really great documentation. XFree86 itself didn't have much on its driver layer or integration interface, and that was a real problem. But the protocol references were a thing of beauty.
jacquesm 5y ago
Anybody here remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR ? That was what I used on Unix before I got my grubby little hands on an X Windows source distribution. It was quite elegant and super lightweight compared to X but at the same time it was somewhat limited. Monochrome only (for me, at least) and a bit sparse it got the job done with a minimum of fuss.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  Yes! I compiled it a few years ago for Xenix and had it running quite happily on a 386
- FullyFunctional 5y ago
  I never forgot and in most respects it was far more elegant than X which always seemed a very poor design. What I especially liked about MGR was that remoting was dead simple; it worked as long as your terminal worked so ssh somewhere and start an app - it just worked (AFAIR). X had remoting is a primary feature, but it's hackish and awkward and filled with issues (you really don't want to know what happens under the hood of 'ssh -Y'). However, neither really works for application that needs massive updates at a fast framerate, so hopefully Wayland will work better.
  - glandium 5y ago
    ssh didn't exist when either X or MGR were created.
    - FullyFunctional 5y ago
      s/ssh/rsh/
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    >ssh somewhere SSH was introduced in 1995, so back in the 80's you just used good old insecure unencrypted rlogin or telnet, and maybe Rick Adam's SLIP over a modem in the late 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol
Zardoz84 5y ago
Wow! I'm same age that X !
unixhero 5y ago
The timelines were changed as of this publication.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Will never forget fumbling around with my NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card in X config files only to end up in a console with X failing to start Waste of my goddamn time.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  The most fun part of the PC ports of the X server (probably XFree86, memory is getting a little spongey) was that getting the modeline wrong when you were using a CRT could cause physical damage to the monitor. Back then, I always used to buy fancy, expensive monitors (Sony trinitron based things) and there was always that moment of doubt, chewing your fingernails before you made changes to the modeline and kicked off the X server. It's all automatic now of course, but it was a genuine halt and catch fire scenario.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Selecting the option "Monitor that can do <highest resolution of your monitor> at <vertical scan frequency listed on the back>" from Xconfigurator has never steered me wrong -- and I have used some grotty monitors. This kind of malarkey was only necessary because, at the time, unlike sensible systems like the Macintosh, PC monitors did not report their identification and capabilities to the host system. Eventually the EDID system would be implemented, allowing automatic configuration -- but it would be a few years before X got decent support for it.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I never heard of a monitor damaged by a bad modeline. Doubting now it happened.
aspyct 5y ago
So what's Argus?
- fredoralive 5y ago
  Seems to be a programming language created at MIT around the same time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_(programming_language)
iamflimflam1 5y ago
I still remember dialling into my university account back in the very early 90's and running X windows over the connection at a friends house.
zppln 5y ago
My current (air gapped) development environment includes CDE 1.6.2 on Solaris 10. At some point some devs found this to be a bit... dated, and decided to roll WM flavour of the day: Fluxbox. Sadly, one of the X components was missing from Solaris. No problem! One dev hacked together his own version in Perl based on the spec. There's something both beautiful and insane about the situation, which persists to this day.
papaman 5y ago
jraph 5y ago
I invite anyone interested by the subject to watch Keith Packard's amazing presentation on this at LCA 2020: A Political History of X - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ (can be listened without the video if you want to do other things while listening to it)
marcodiego 5y ago
I don't miss having to type xf86config and answering a lot of question, some of witch required reading the manual for the monitor and the video card.
- ajross 5y ago
  You realize all that tuning[1] still happens today, right? The difference is that your Linux box with a display is now a boxed product from Google or Samsung or whoever and they did it for you. In the 90's we were sharing a big communal integration effort. [1] And more, though the details have changed. No one cares about "mode timings" since all that synchronization happens across the link in the panel hardware. Now it's all about panel self-refresh drivers and backlight control and DMA threshold tuning.
ape4 5y ago
Love that it was build on W - which I have never heard of. Some good trivia there.
speedbird 5y ago
Ah, back in the day. I got X11r3 on tape to build locally on a Sun3 as part of a project. 4MB RAM - huge! What was the network game? Maze war?
uep 5y ago
Has anyone here has used FreeNX? I had read good things about its performance over the network (and even cell networks), but I've never encountered anyone who's actually used it. I guess I'm going to have to be the person to try it so I can be the "person who's used it" to others. And to those wondering, I think this is relevant to this link, as I believe FreeNX is more-or-less the X11 protocol, but does much more caching and compression.
- azinman2 5y ago
  I used to use it back in the day. It had amazing performance — the first Remote Desktop that showed me what was possible, and far and away the best way to do remote X.

263 points by marcodiego 5y ago

(1984)

Interesting to see the origins of X. Were there really 10 versions before it got to X11 and why did the version stop there?

paulrouget 5y ago
11 is the protocol version. With multiple implementations. I think once extensions were introduced, they probably didn't need to extend the protocol.
bboreham 5y ago
Yes. 11 is the version of the protocol, which didn’t change fundamentally after X11, so they moved to X11R2, R3, etc., and adding extensions.
indeyets 5y ago
It happened really fast. X1 happened in may 1984, x6 in 1985 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Origin_and_early_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Origin_and_ear...
djur 5y ago
Yes. There were a number of rapidly developed versions up to X10 in 1986, which was the first one released under a free license (and thus the first one widely adopted). X11 was an overhaul of X10 intended to increase portability/compatibility, and also the first version developed as a community open source project rather than internally to MIT. That came out in 1987. As for why X11 was the last major version: the protocol has remained backwards compatible since then. Clients created decades ago can still operate with modern X servers. It's pretty cool! http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...
peter303 5y ago
Similar to HTML: a lot of early evolution in the early releases. Then a long wait for version 5. Version 4 had a lot of neat stuff like math typesetting. Html balkanized during the commercial browser wars. Tim made a valiant effort to hold it together these past decades.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

checkyoursudo 5y ago

It is interesting that something 'not the ultimate window system' can last almost 40 years already, though it also seems like Wayland is getting close to critical mass of adoption?

thesuitonym 5y ago
Wayland is getting close, and is very good indeed, but X is still the default window system. I feel like there are a lot of technologies that are this way. They were not designed to be the best, but good enough, and they have passed the test of time.
- a-dub 5y ago
  i have a hard time liking wayland because they're taking away remoting, which was one of my favorite parts of x.
  - johnny22 5y ago
    waypipe is one solution in that realm (i haven't used it myself though). but it's not like x servers and clients will stop working.
    - colonwqbang 5y ago
      Once wayland gets good adoption, people will gradually stop supporting X. That is how it always works in software.
  - sprash 5y ago
    Personally I like the modularity of X11 because it has a lot of standardized interfaces. For example, you can exchange the window manager and the compositing manager at runtime without affecting any running programs. In my opinion X12 should be even more modular and should have even more standardized interfaces. E.g. window decorations should not be tied to a window manager. There should be a standardized way to do toolkits/widgets where the backend and rendering can be swapped at runtime. It should be possible to run headless GUI programs that can be attached and reattached to any running instance of a display server. So kind of the opposite of what Wayland is doing.

paulrouget 5y ago

The implementation of Scheifler' X window system for IBM/Intel was called X386, which eventually was forked and freed. It was renamed XFree86, as a pun. Then was renamed Xorg. There were a few implementations of X for different unixes. Mostly closed source. It was very buggy, and patches were posted online, under the form a LD_PRELOAD-ed libraries. iirc, I had to preload a few libraries to work around the HPUX X implementation to be capable of running Mozilla Suite. Fun times :)

pengaru 5y ago
> It was renamed XFree86, as a pun. Then was renamed Xorg. It wasn't simply renamed Xorg, that's yet another fork after XFree86 development became stagnant and the license changed to something GPL-incompatible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86#2002:_Growing_dissent_within_the_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86#2002:_Growing_dissent_...
p_l 5y ago
One issue is that while some vendors went out of their way to update and modernize the internals of their X11 implementations (most famously Xsgi, which afaik ripped out all graphic driver code due to being unsuitable), Xfree86 in many ways stuck to original code, even if certain advances were made (pluggability, loadable drivers, etc.). Which unfortunately led to more and more problems that were papered over with XShm and drawing on client side, finally leading to Wayland...
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  > Which unfortunately led to more and more problems that were papered over with XShm and drawing on client side, finally leading to Wayland... But that ship hasn't totally sailed right? It's not as if Wayland was the amazing tech everybody hoped for and jumped to. Wayland is old by now, it's only half a success and many of us are still using Xorg. I'm not saying that in two decades Xorg may not be gone for good but at the moment Wayland and Xorg still coexist.
jhoechtl 5y ago
Thank you, that was entirely new history for me. From Wikipedia: > MGR featured overlapped [...] windows and [...]. Took a while to see the strength of tiling window managers.

taubek 5y ago

My first encounter with graphics on UNIX was in 1994 or 1995. It was CDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment. Before that I've used GEOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) on Commodore 64 :)

pantulis 5y ago
For me it was OpenWindows, I believe running on SunOS 4.x
- taubek 5y ago
  I remember that when I got my first gig as sys admin we've had two SGI workstations. I think that they were SGI Indigo2 workstations.
  - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    We had some SGI workstation running in a prepress print environment because Leonardo was the only software that could handle the amount data. Amazing little machines.
glandium 5y ago
Mine was in 95 on NCD X Terminals, machines that would only have a X server. ISTR they automatically were getting a Window Manager and a Terminal from a central VMS server. We'd then telnet to another VMS server, where we'd access a mailbox via CLI, or the web with Mosaic. There were also other SunOS or Linux servers for various purposes. The rooms where the terminals were had something like 20 terminals, and sometimes we fooled around by making things appear in sequence on each of them, as though they were moving from one to the next, which you could do from one of the servers, whuch would connect to each terminal in sequence (the good old days of all ports being freely accessible)
- taubek 5y ago

ar7hur 5y ago

"Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape."

miohtama 5y ago
80s was the golden era of hackers.
hoyd 5y ago
how many did go and got the code on tape?
- peter303 5y ago
  Since I was at Stanford then, I downloaded it on sunet.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Oh, look at this guy everyone, with his fancy "downloading".

drzaiusapelord 5y ago

I wonder how those email addresses worked. Who or what is window@athena? Project Athena is from MIT, so maybe window is a shared account for the group or window is a proto newgroup? Also its so odd to think that the code couldn't be emailed because of size limitations of the time and you'd have to bring a tape. Weird that he didn't ask for a floppy because floppies were common by then too. Lets remember in 1984 you had the original Mac and a year out from the Amiga so not exactly ancient history and both those devices supported the newer 3.5" disks with 5.25" disks being very common by then. I'm guessing the unix big iron culture of the time was primarily tape based. Also talk about a missed opportunity. I'd love to see a screenshot of this email on the original x. I'm guessing there was no email client for x back then but it could at least be read in a terminal window. I'm assuming x supported a terminal window this early if it had a working windows manager, but maybe vt100 emulation wasn't in the cards just yet. Still, what a neat piece of computer history. Stuff like this always gives me warm feelings, like in a past life I was somehow active in the culture then and feel nostalgia for it.

bdn_ 5y ago
> I wonder how those email addresses worked. Who or what is window@athena? Project Athena is from MIT, so maybe window is a shared account for the group or window is a proto newgroup? The history of email standards is interesting, to say the least! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rjsw 5y ago
The source wouldn't fit on a single floppy disk.
Inhibit 5y ago
It doesn't mention which kind of tape. I'd be interested to know what they used. Also it looks like they're referring to the VS100. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation I never had access to those but I'd conjecture from the post they might've used tape. There at least.

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago

Did anyone ever get around to writing documentation?

jeffrallen 5y ago
Tim O'Reilly published some books on it. /s
- ajross 5y ago
  The real cognoscenti bought the DEC Press books instead, actually. The O'Reilly things looked great on a bookshelf (I still have my set!), but Scheifler/Gettys what was we actually used when we wanted to look something up. And indeed, these were all really great documentation. XFree86 itself didn't have much on its driver layer or integration interface, and that was a real problem. But the protocol references were a thing of beauty.

jacquesm 5y ago

Anybody here remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR ? That was what I used on Unix before I got my grubby little hands on an X Windows source distribution. It was quite elegant and super lightweight compared to X but at the same time it was somewhat limited. Monochrome only (for me, at least) and a bit sparse it got the job done with a minimum of fuss.

gattilorenz 5y ago
Yes! I compiled it a few years ago for Xenix and had it running quite happily on a 386
FullyFunctional 5y ago
I never forgot and in most respects it was far more elegant than X which always seemed a very poor design. What I especially liked about MGR was that remoting was dead simple; it worked as long as your terminal worked so ssh somewhere and start an app - it just worked (AFAIR). X had remoting is a primary feature, but it's hackish and awkward and filled with issues (you really don't want to know what happens under the hood of 'ssh -Y'). However, neither really works for application that needs massive updates at a fast framerate, so hopefully Wayland will work better.
- glandium 5y ago
  ssh didn't exist when either X or MGR were created.
  - FullyFunctional 5y ago
    s/ssh/rsh/
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  >ssh somewhere SSH was introduced in 1995, so back in the 80's you just used good old insecure unencrypted rlogin or telnet, and maybe Rick Adam's SLIP over a modem in the late 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol

Zardoz84 5y ago

Wow! I'm same age that X !

unixhero 5y ago

The timelines were changed as of this publication.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Will never forget fumbling around with my NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card in X config files only to end up in a console with X failing to start Waste of my goddamn time.

smackeyacky 5y ago
The most fun part of the PC ports of the X server (probably XFree86, memory is getting a little spongey) was that getting the modeline wrong when you were using a CRT could cause physical damage to the monitor. Back then, I always used to buy fancy, expensive monitors (Sony trinitron based things) and there was always that moment of doubt, chewing your fingernails before you made changes to the modeline and kicked off the X server. It's all automatic now of course, but it was a genuine halt and catch fire scenario.
- bitwize 5y ago
  Selecting the option "Monitor that can do <highest resolution of your monitor> at <vertical scan frequency listed on the back>" from Xconfigurator has never steered me wrong -- and I have used some grotty monitors. This kind of malarkey was only necessary because, at the time, unlike sensible systems like the Macintosh, PC monitors did not report their identification and capabilities to the host system. Eventually the EDID system would be implemented, allowing automatic configuration -- but it would be a few years before X got decent support for it.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I never heard of a monitor damaged by a bad modeline. Doubting now it happened.

aspyct 5y ago

So what's Argus?

fredoralive 5y ago
Seems to be a programming language created at MIT around the same time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_(programming_language)

iamflimflam1 5y ago

I still remember dialling into my university account back in the very early 90's and running X windows over the connection at a friends house.

zppln 5y ago

My current (air gapped) development environment includes CDE 1.6.2 on Solaris 10. At some point some devs found this to be a bit... dated, and decided to roll WM flavour of the day: Fluxbox. Sadly, one of the X components was missing from Solaris. No problem! One dev hacked together his own version in Perl based on the spec. There's something both beautiful and insane about the situation, which persists to this day.

papaman 5y ago

jraph 5y ago

I invite anyone interested by the subject to watch Keith Packard's amazing presentation on this at LCA 2020: A Political History of X - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ (can be listened without the video if you want to do other things while listening to it)

marcodiego 5y ago

I don't miss having to type xf86config and answering a lot of question, some of witch required reading the manual for the monitor and the video card.

ajross 5y ago
You realize all that tuning[1] still happens today, right? The difference is that your Linux box with a display is now a boxed product from Google or Samsung or whoever and they did it for you. In the 90's we were sharing a big communal integration effort. [1] And more, though the details have changed. No one cares about "mode timings" since all that synchronization happens across the link in the panel hardware. Now it's all about panel self-refresh drivers and backlight control and DMA threshold tuning.

ape4 5y ago

Love that it was build on W - which I have never heard of. Some good trivia there.

speedbird 5y ago

Ah, back in the day. I got X11r3 on tape to build locally on a Sun3 as part of a project. 4MB RAM - huge! What was the network game? Maze war?

uep 5y ago

Has anyone here has used FreeNX? I had read good things about its performance over the network (and even cell networks), but I've never encountered anyone who's actually used it. I guess I'm going to have to be the person to try it so I can be the "person who's used it" to others. And to those wondering, I think this is relevant to this link, as I believe FreeNX is more-or-less the X11 protocol, but does much more caching and compression.

azinman2 5y ago
I used to use it back in the day. It had amazing performance — the first Remote Desktop that showed me what was possible, and far and away the best way to do remote X.