1950s schlock-horror title card: From deep within the labs at MIT, it's The Thing That Just Wouldn't Die! Shambling onwards for 40 years and counting! After I

1950s schlock-horror title card: From deep within the labs at MIT, it's The Thing That Just Wouldn't Die! Shambling onwards for 40 years and counting! After I expressed interest in learning how to program X on my first Linux machine in 1995, a friend showed me the giant wall-o-manuals (I think that's how O'Reilly got its start) and said "Are you ready to read all of these?" I got by learning the basics of Xlib with the man pages and, I believe, Kenton Lee's site. X's display model is really straightforward if you already understand something like Win32, which is one reason why Wine was able to make rapid progress: translating GDI calls to X calls required only a thin shim. X ran FAST, too. If you set the GC clip origin and mask you could blit a sprite in one XCopyArea call; I banged out a game engine based on that and was able to get draw speeds that Windows required DirectX to match (assuming a local display).