3 ms·

You’re aware that web browsers have filled that role pretty effectively, right?

ddingus 3y ago
Sort of. Having run high 3nd X CAD modeling applications on SGI, for example, browser stuff seems clunky and anything really performant seems to load executables locally. That said, yes! Browsers act a lot like X servers do. What I am getting at here is not entirely a technical problem. Most computers offered a single user, eventually multi tasking graphical environment. The computers running a well implemented X window system offered multi user graphical computing. It could and often was run as a single user graphical environment too. X had everything compartmentalized, and that allowed a sysadmin to set the computing up any way that made sense. Once, just for fun, I had one machine serving up fonts, another doing window management, yet another serving the graphics to the user, another one sharing files to another one running the application! 5 machines all contributing to any number of graphical users, and in my toy, fun case, that was two users. One user was me, and I was using an sgi, and the other Windows 2000. Was kind of fun to see their face as the familiar application looked the same on his windows box as it did on IRIX Two clicks on an icon, or a command given and "the application" happened on whatever machine was serving up graphics.
cduzz 3y ago
Indeed -- web browsers are very comparable to X -- especially with things like web sockets or streaming media. Which is why I offered that the question "what process is generating my window" is comparable to "what is the PID of the process that generated this HTTPs response?"
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I feel that using a browser with cloud shell alongside some cloud instances is a time travel to how I was doing development on the university computing center and my years of dotcom wave. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sort of. Having run high 3nd X CAD modeling applications on SGI, for example, browser stuff seems clunky and anything really performant seems to load executables locally. That said, yes! Browsers act a lot like X servers do. What I am getting at here is not entirely a technical problem. Most computers offered a single user, eventually multi tasking graphical environment. The computers running a well implemented X window system offered multi user graphical computing. It could and often was run as a single user graphical environment too. X had everything compartmentalized, and that allowed a sysadmin to set the computing up any way that made sense. Once, just for fun, I had one machine serving up fonts, another doing window management, yet another serving the graphics to the user, another one sharing files to another one running the application! 5 machines all contributing to any number of graphical users, and in my toy, fun case, that was two users. One user was me, and I was using an sgi, and the other Windows 2000. Was kind of fun to see their face as the familiar application looked the same on his windows box as it did on IRIX Two clicks on an icon, or a command given and "the application" happened on whatever machine was serving up graphics.

cduzz 3y ago

Indeed -- web browsers are very comparable to X -- especially with things like web sockets or streaming media. Which is why I offered that the question "what process is generating my window" is comparable to "what is the PID of the process that generated this HTTPs response?"

pjmlp 3y ago
I feel that using a browser with cloud shell alongside some cloud instances is a time travel to how I was doing development on the university computing center and my years of dotcom wave. The more things change, the more they stay the same.