[HN Gopher] X debut 40 years ago (1984)
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X debut 40 years ago (1984)
Author : guerby
Score : 160 points
Date : 2024-06-19 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.talisman.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.talisman.org)
| guerby wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
|
| "X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts
| Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984.[3] The X protocol has been
| at version 11 (hence "X11") since September 1987."
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| FWIW the XML specification has been at version 1.1 for 17 years
| as well.
|
| The CEE/7 standard was last revised in 1983 and is used by
| hundreds of millions of people every day.
| tapia wrote:
| It was fun to read the recommendation to switch from W to X. I
| guess we are now back to W :P
| arjvik wrote:
| ayland :)
| richie-guix wrote:
| According to Lindy's Law this means I'll be ready to switch to
| Wayland no sooner than 2065.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'll be really surprised if Wayland is still popular when X is
| really ready to be tossed out. But surely by 2065 somebody will
| have come up with an entirely new successor.
| ithinkso wrote:
| I'm switching to Wayland on the New Year's Eve of the year of
| Linux desktop
| worksonmine wrote:
| > Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape.
|
| Made me smile.
| ugh123 wrote:
| 80s "git clone"
| asveikau wrote:
| Back when the t in tar meant something.
| modeless wrote:
| Ha, I didn't know the name came from incrementing W. Surprised I
| haven't seen a Y window system. A quick search shows that there
| have been several, but none successful obviously.
|
| Edit: it gets better. Apparently W ran on the V operating system.
| gumby wrote:
| IIRC, Symbolics' "Dynamic Windows" window system (later CLIM)
| was originally called Y windows.
| asveikau wrote:
| Turned out to be adequate for experimentation.
|
| I think it's interesting they had a CLU binding before C.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_(programming_language)
| kkylin wrote:
| OMG. We used CLU in a software engineering. The compiler
| (really a CLU-to-C translator I think?) was sooooo painfully
| slow. Can't imagine using it for anything moderately
| complicated.
| jll29 wrote:
| For years, I had seen X11 desktops in magazines before Linux and
| the Intel 80486DX-33 permitted me to first boot X11 on my own
| machine in 1992 (after installing it from fifty 3.5" floppy
| disks, which required two trips to the nearest university, as the
| first time one of the disks was faulty).
|
| Still remember that feeling of first typing xeyes & and xlock &
| and inspecting the result on that 14" color CRT screen (I was
| beaming more than it, perhaps).
|
| Then by winter term 1996 I owned a refurbished HP9000-715/75
| running HP-UX 9.03 (also X11-based), pre-owned and via uni
| discount and still the price of a car at the time... the only
| undergrad on my corridor who had a workstation in the dorm room
| (its 21" CRT filling most of the 9 m2 space that was not occupied
| by the bed). My next goal then was to get all the manual books
| (X11 and HP-UX) - still got 'em.
|
| HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY, X11! And thanks to the X11 authors for
| making it available for free - imagine, X11 supported mice with
| 16 buttons already back then!
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't guess you went to Texas A&M. I remember about '96 we
| scanned the residence hall local network for XDMCP services and
| discovered the one weirdo with a HPUX box.
| mshroyer wrote:
| Ha, this brings back memories. Around 2003 I used either
| XDMCP or plain X11 forwarding over SSH to access my dorm room
| computer while at home visiting my parents, and later got a
| letter from school IT warning me about abusive network
| traffic.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > the only undergrad on my corridor who had a workstation in
| the dorm room
|
| In 1993, I worked my way up to becoming the lab manager for the
| residential computer lab in my dorm (basically a bunch of Macs
| for people to use, as we were the dorm farthest away from the
| library's undergrad computing center). I did that so I could
| put my SGI Indigo XS24 directly onto the 10Base2 Ethernet,
| rather than connecting it via the university's phone system in
| my room using PPP at 57kbps.
|
| I went back for a reunion about five years ago and the lab was
| still running (although in a different dorm now). I talked to
| the kid running it, who was nice enough, but he said nobody
| used the lab really, and he didn't know the first thing about
| networking. He was a gamer who "wanted to learn more about
| Linux". I tried to keep an open mind, times have changed, and
| he was eager, but boy was it depressing that the old culture is
| long dead.
| fullstop wrote:
| I downloaded so many Slackware disk sets just to find out that
| it didn't support my SCSI card. Good old root and boot disks.
| _joel wrote:
| 2024 is finally the year of the X desktop
| lmz wrote:
| The XL year of the X desktop, even.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape.
|
| What kind of tape would that be in those times?
| slashdave wrote:
| Reel to reel
| thequux wrote:
| Most likely 9 track
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-track_tape)
| neilwilson wrote:
| Could be a QIC tape drive, but likely to be reel given it's a
| Wang.
|
| QIC-24 was nine-track in a handy container - a bit like a
| compact cassette for computers.
| rjsw wrote:
| My 386 machine had a QIC-24 in 1987, I got a copy of X10R4
| from my local university.
| astrodust wrote:
| Hopefully not paper.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Or scotch.
| abridgett wrote:
| I still remember playing Quake on Linux - with the X display
| being displayed on a different computer over the network. The
| different computer was running HP-UX (HP's Unix) on a PA-RISC
| chip.
| fullstop wrote:
| They didn't trap Ctrl+C on Linux, so you had to be really
| careful about key binds.
| astrodust wrote:
| The idea that you could hook several X terminals up to a modest
| system like a SPARCstation and share it was kind of amazing. Even
| mid-range workstations were insanely expensive back then.
|
| (May have played an inordinate amount of Netrek on those.)
| User23 wrote:
| Xpilot did some damage to productivity at more than one
| computer lab.
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought it was a missed opportunity that X never got an audio
| protocol built-in. I guess streaming audio was considered too
| exotic in the 1980s, but getting sound to chase X applications
| around is still an unsolved problem. I think it would have forced
| Linux and other Unix-like OSes to fix their broken and crufty
| audio subsystems much earlier. It was a real nightmare getting
| audio out of sound cards back in the 90s and even 2000s.
|
| I still remember having startx finally work properly on my
| FreeBSD 2.1 system running on a Pentium-75 with 16MB of RAM (so
| luxurious!) back in 1995. The fixed sync monitor[1] coming to
| life with that black and white crosshatch pattern, and probably
| TWM decorating that terminal window that would shut down X if you
| closed it. Luckily at that time there were quite a number of
| window managers so you could try a bunch to see which one you
| liked the most. The hardest part of getting X running was
| tracking down those magic numbers you had to enter for the
| modeline in the configuration file, although old X used to ship
| with a database you could look up of older monitors that were no
| longer in production, but might be kinda close to what you had.
|
| [1] Supporting 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768(interlaced only)
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Much respect.
| ori_b wrote:
| 11 revisions later, they ended up at X11, and then time stopped.
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