That would have been impossible without a display server that supported X plus some other protocol (much like Sun display servers supported both X and NeWS). S

That would have been impossible without a display server that supported X plus some other protocol (much like Sun display servers supported both X and NeWS). See, for example, the protocol spec for the AllocColor request: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xproto/x11protocol.html#requests:AllocColor https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xproto/x11protocol.ht... Note that the 'pixel' return value, representing the pixel value on the display of the returned color, is a CARD32 (that is, unsigned 32-bit integer). If you have sources for SGI supporting display of >32bpp images, I'd really like to see them because I'm curious as to how it's done. Note that handling of >32bpp images doesn't count; I can write code that uses any pixel format I like and then convert it to 24bpp or 32bpp for display.