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The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoFor anyone just reading the title: It's about physical thin-client X11 server machines, not xterm.
- lproven 1y agoI feel like I aged a decade reading that. You're not wrong but it's an interpretation that didn't even cross my mind. :-(
- amiga386 1y agoI was driving myself mad; xterm was released in 1984 and it didn't really matter there was no XDM because there because you merely needed a window manager to tile your xterm windows... But sure, the definition of "X terminal" here is meant to mean dedicated hardware that runs an X server connecting to a remote X11 display manager, and nothing else. Those were always somewhat niche, in the same way that once terminal emulators existed, general purpose PCs displaced hardware terminals. In the 1990s, my university used inexpensive diskless X86 PCs running X386 (predecessor of XFree86) with just a ramdisk, booted by DHCP / BOOTP / TFTP.
- beej71 1y agoThe good old days. We had a bunch of X terminals hooked up with thin net to some HP735 servers in college.
- HenryBemis 1y agoIn those good old days my Uni was giving away those bulky Unix "manuals" (after every major upgrade they were refreshing the documentation/dossiers) and they would leave on a table a few dozens of the 'outdated' ones. Everyone would grab one and it was a first-come-first-served, and you could end up in a 'useless' dossier, but still they were amazing reads.
- bluGill 1y agoI miss the days of useful manuals. They were hard and expensive to write, but they had a wealth of technical information that is often impossible to find today.
- arethuza 1y agoOne of the nice things when getting a new Sun workstation back in the day (say 1990 or so) was getting vast amounts of excellent printed documentation and folders into which they had to be clipped. Sun even used to supply proper books (e.g. the PostScript books) with OpenWindows to cover NeWS...
- HenryBemis 1y agoThe title made me think: the Tesla 'copilot' didn't immediately have a "copilot".
- TMWNN 1y agoI presume that X terminals did not appear at the same time as X Window because Project Athena <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena>, which created X, had its users use "real" workstations from the start, the IBM RT PC being the first. I don't know if MIT ever deployed any X terminals but, as I understand it, one of the tenets of Athena is that every workstation is a full-fledged remote login-capable node of the Athena cluster.
- bediger4000 1y agoProject Athena is not given enough credit.
- ch_123 1y agoX originally was created on/ran on a graphics terminal - the DEC VAXstation 100. The VS100 was quite different to the later X thin client terminals: it required an adapter card to be installed in a host system, and the software which ran on the VS100 could directly access a chunk of shared memory on the host. Ports to workstations with inbuilt graphics hardware came later. References: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation#VAXstation_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation#VAXstation_100
- ggm 1y agoI had to both administer, and operate on the early X terminals from several vendors they were interesting. Labtam made strides developing boxes using the more novel Intel chips and this may have been what they sold on when they got out of the business and moved to being an ISP in Australia. I enjoyed using blits and the early dec Ultrix workstations. Thin X terminals were super cool. But, also really stressed out your Ethernet, and because we didn't have good audio models in X at that time, when multimedia became viable they stopped being as useful. But for a distraction free multiple term, low overhead wm world... super good price performance cost.
- wkat4242 1y agoI was surprised how a room of top notch 1280x1024 terminals was able to function so well on a shared 10mbps with pretty bad collision detection to boot. X apps of the day were super optimised for local drawing. Even games were super smooth. Toolkits like Motif were all draw calls. By the way back then we thought Motif was bloated lol :) And then... Came the internet. People suddenly started running NCSA Mosaic in droves that bogged down the single core server. And those browsers started to push lots of bitmap stuff through the pipe to the terminals. Now that was bad, yes. When Netscape came with its image backgrounds and even heavier process people started moving away to the PC rooms :( Because all scroll content needed to be bitstreamed then. Ps video content at that time wasn't even a thing yet. That came a bit later with realvideo first. But there was a time when X terminals were more than sufficient, probably for a decade or so.
- bmacho 1y ago> Because all scroll content needed to be bitstreamed then. Is it better now? Can a browser locally scroll an image, without restreaming it?
- londons_explore 1y agoA modern browser (ie. chromium) uses the GPU for all drawing. Here is an awesome (slightly outdated) talk about the architecture: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/AK_rwEp61ME?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/AK_rw... The basic idea is that HTML content is drawn in transparent 'tiles' which are layered on top of one another. When the user scrolls, the tiles don't need to be redrawn, but instead just re-composited at their new positions. GPU's are super fast at that, and even a 15 year old GPU can easily do this for tens of layers at 60 FPS. On a linux with a remote X server, I think the tiles would all end up on the X server, with only the pretty small 'draw tile number 22 at this location' going across the network. So the answer to your question is 'yes'.
- anthk 1y agoThe Linux Gazzete had several articles on that, one of them from Andorra. Great times. https://linuxgazette.net/issue45/ward/ward.html https://linuxgazette.net/issue45/ward/ward.html
- aa-jv 1y agoFor most of the latter part of the 80's, I used Quarterdeck Desqview as my 'terminal', which allowed me to have 4 independent concurrent MSDOS sessions running on my 386, each of which with its own video and network connectivity, so that I could telnet into my MIPS Magnum pizzabox and do some work. At the beginning of the 90p's, I was on the hunt for an alternative to the MSDOS part when, eventually, I tried minix instead .. and that led to replacing it with Linux as soon as it was available on funet. Multiple runs to Fry's to get more RAM and some CPU upgrades later, and I was soon compiling an X/Windows setup on my brand new 486 with 16 Megabytes of RAM .. and about a week after that, I replaced my Quarterdeck setup with a functioning Linux workstation, thorns and warts and all. That was a nice kick in the pants of the operators who were threatening to take away my pizzabox, but it was short-lived joy, as not long thereafter I was able to afford an Indy, which served great for the purpose all through the 90's - and my Linux systems were relegated off the desktop to function as 'servers', once more. But I always wondered about Quarterdecks' Desqview/X variant, and whether that would have been an alternative solution to the multi-term problem. It seems to me that this was available in 1987/88, which is odd given the articles' claims that X workstations weren't really widespread around that period.
- rjsw 1y agoI ran my own port of X11 on top of Interactive Systems 386/ix running on a 386 in 1987/88.
- aa-jv 1y agoNice, I remember poking at that a few times but never being able to justify a license purchase to my boss, who believed that I had everything I needed in the form of the Magnum pizzabox, and why would anyone need a UI for programming, lol ..
- lproven 1y ago> But I always wondered about Quarterdecks' Desqview/X variant Dv/X was remarkable tech, and if it had shipped earlier could have changed the course of the industry. Sadly, it came too late. > It seems to me that this was available in 1987/88, No. That is roughly when I entered the computer industry. Dv/X was rumoured then, but the state of the art was OS/2 1.1, released late 1988 and the first version of OS/2 with a GUI. Dv/X was not released until about 5Y later: https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-1x https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-1x 1992. That's the same year as Windows 3.1, but critically, Windows 3.0 was in 1990, 2 years earlier. Windows 3.0 was a result of the flop of OS/2 1.x. OS/2 1.x was a new 16-bit multitasking networking kernel -- but that meant new drivers. MS discarded the radical new OS, it discarded networking completely (until later), and moved the multitasking into the GUI layer, allowing Win3 to run on top of the single-tasking MS-DOS kernel. That meant excellent compatibility: it ran on almost anything, can it could run almost all DOS apps, and multitask them. And thanks to a brilliant skunkworks project, mostly by one man, David Weise, assisted by Murray Sargent, it combined 3 separate products (Windows 2, Windows/286 and Windows/386) into a single product that ran on all 3 types of PC and took good advantage of all of them. I wrote about its development here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/18/how_windows_got_to_v3/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/18/how_windows_got_to_v3... It also did bring in some of the GUI design from OS/2 1.1, mainly from 1.2, and 1.3 -- the Program Manager and File Manager UI, the proportional fonts, the fake-3D controls, some of the Control Panel, and so on. It kept the best user-facing parts and threw away the fancy invisible stuff underneath which was problematic. Result: smash hit, redefined the PC market, and when Dv/X arrived it was doomed: too late, same as OS/2 2.0, which came out the same year as Dv/X. If Dv/X had come out in the late 1980s, before Windows 3, it could have changed the way the PC industry went. Dv/X combined the good bits of DOS, 386 memory management and multitasking, Unix networking and Unix GUIs into an interesting value proposition: network your DOS PCs with Unix boxes over Unix standards, get remote access to powerful Unix apps, and if vendors wanted, it enabled ports of Unix apps to this new multitasking networked DOS. In the '80s that could have been a contender. Soon afterwards it was followed by Linux and the BSDs, which made that Unix stuff free and ran on the same kit. That would have been a great combination -- Dv/X PCs talking to BSD or Linux servers, when those Unix boxes didn't really have useful GUIs yet. Windows 3 offered a different deal: it combined the good bits of DOS, OS/2 1.x's GUI, and Windows 2.x into a whole that ran on anything and could run old DOS apps and new GUI apps, side by side. Networking didn't follow until Windows for Workgroups which followed Windows 3.1. Only businesses wanted that, so MS postponed it. Good move.
- exe34 1y agoI blocked a number of social media and news sites on my phone - I find myself doomscrolling through wikipedia in the morning now. Win!
- dfox 1y agoAs for NCD X terminals (at least the later ones), surprising amount of stuff could run directly on the terminal (which ran some weird MMU-less BSD variant): mwm and motif session manager, dtterm-like terminal with telnet and serial port support, some kind of JVM and two different variants of mosaic were part of the SW package (it booted either from flash PC card or from NFS).
- pjmlp 1y agoAt my university we had a couple of X terminals from IBM, connecting into DG/UX, and I can certaily vouch that for early 1990's they weren't that cheap to acquire. If memory serves me right, we had four of them on the student lab. Everyone else could enjoy connecting to DG/UX via terminal app on Windows for Workgroups, or the older green and ambar text based phosphor terminals. As anecdote, those big screen X terminals were quite often used to have four parallel sessions of mixes using talk and some MUD game.
- pantulis 1y agoWe had like 4 Tektronix X Terminals that could connect to Sun workstations for those fortunate to have accounts, the rest was using VT terminals to a VAX. And yes, the talk and MUD use cases where popular ;)
- bluGill 1y agoThey were cheap compared to the cost of the workstation they connected to. But nobody would call them cheap even if you look at the price today without adjusting for inflation.
- somat 1y agoThe tricky thing about justifying an X terminal is that it requires a nice graphics system and probably a nice cpu to drive that graphics system as well, so really the only thing you don't need is storage. basically it is hard to save money because you are buying most of a nice computer anyway.
- msh 1y agoThe Sun Ray terminals they used at my university back in the early 2000s was very nice.
- rbanffy 1y agoSadly they used a proprietary protocol. I don’t think there is much software to make them usable today, unlike X terminals, which still can be useful daily drivers (if you don’t use browser based apps).
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- nothingneko 1y agowouldn’t you just need enough to render a window? i’m not sure if everything is sent pre-rendered or not
- somat 1y agoThink early 90's computers, and everything required to run a X server well. lots of memory, nice graphics, a nice cpu to move those graphics around. despite being technically thin clients, Dedicated X servers were not cheap. It is sort of like the anecdote about an early sys-admin who traced down a problem with the new department laser printer locking up for hours to one engineer who had to be told to knock it off when he explained that he was printing nothing, But the printer had, by far, the most powerful CPU in the building so he ported all his simulation programs to postscript and was running them on the printer.
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- bitwize 1y agoOne of HP's first X terminals ran on a 186. The same beleaguered 16-bit CPU that made the Tandy 2000 go, also powered X terminals in the early 90s (albeit at twice the speed). For all its "bloat", X could support a very sophisticated GUI -- over the network -- on very limited hardware by the standards of 30 years ago, let alone today.
- cbm-vic-20 1y agoI recall in the early 90s, X Terminals were useful for accessing applications that were licensed per-machine, or were only available on expensive hardware. X Terminals let users use those applications from anywhere on campus. Very convenient!
- loph 1y agoIt was the interoperability of X Window System devices that enabled this. Your X server (e.g. a X terminal) could display applications running on a variety of other vendors' hardware and operating systems. The specification enabled this interoperability. Apps running on SunOS could display on VAX workstations, and vice versa (as long as you had TCP/IP installed!) The advantage X terminals had was that they were relatively inexpensive to buy and operate. Most did not require management, however the CPU cost moved into a computer room and you needed a pretty fast network to get reasonable performance.
- hylaride 1y ago> The advantage X terminals had was that they were relatively inexpensive to buy and operate. This was not really true. Those terminals were often extremely expensive compared to "off the shelf" PCs of the time. They required decent CPUs and memory (this was before hardware acceleration) as well as (for the time) decent networking hardware to drive it at scale for larger institutions. On top of that they were usually connected to and had to drive very high res monitors, which weren't cheap either (anecdotally, the first time I "surfed" the web was at my mom's work at a telco lab on HP-UX machines in ~1993-94; when we later got the internet at home I hated doing it on the 800x600 monitor we had). As you alluded to, what it did provide was a central way to administer software and reduce licensing costs, which pre-2000 was almost all commercial - companies were loath to buy multiple commercial compilers/matlab/etc (and the software vendors took awhile to update their models, too). In those days sysadmins often did things by hand and user management alone was far easier on a central mainframe/server. It also did allow some vendor interoperability as you mentioned. "Dumb" text terminals were also the way that things were already done, so they just continued on that model with a GUI until the benefits of local computing became so much more economical. In large orgs, this usually was around when windows started to become prevalent over the course of the 1990s (sometimes with X-servers or terminal clients on windows to replace the physical terminals).
- loph 1y agoThey were inexpensive when compared with a VAXstation II/GPX!
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- phibz 1y agoEven today in my day job I still spend 90% of my time in a No Machine NX session to a remote linux desktop where I do my work. We do it as an extreme form of access control. Our workstations cannot reach any of our systems. Thus if a laptop is stolen, nothing if real value is lost.