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> Was it because of customers already using VMS, Certainly. Vaguely in the 80s VAX was massively popular with universities and the government. Today you'd thin
by chx 4y ago
> Was it because of customers already using VMS,
Certainly. Vaguely in the 80s VAX was massively popular with universities and the government. Today you'd think the twenty grand price of the first PDP-11 (in 1977 dollars, too) was very high but when you compared it to an IBM machine of similar capabilities and there was no one else to compare to, that was pocket change. And then it was pretty much a given there is a VAX supermini somewhere in the building so why not get the workstation from the same company?
They had -- for the time -- pretty good software too. They were absolute trailblazers. X Windows added color support to support the "Caylith" (marketing name VAXstation II/GPX) with its high performance video card. You couldn't possibly get more bleeding edge than that.
- DonHopkins 4y agohttps://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >The X-Windows Disaster >[...] The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVAX framebuffer on acid. [...] >[...] My super 3D graphics, then, runs only on /dev/crt1, and X windows runs only on /dev/crt0. Of course, this means I cannot move my mouse over to the 3d graphics display, but as the HP technical support person said “Why would you ever need to point to something that you’ve drawn in 3D?” [...]
- chx 4y agoNo one ever accused X Windows of being a user friendly or hardware friendly or basically having any attribute even vaguely synonymous of positive. It's even more backwards compatible than Microsoft Windows and there's a very heavy emphasis on backwards. I doubt say, XLFD have seen much use in this century but hey! it worked in 1985 so we can't possibly not support it.