X debut 40 years ago (1984)

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&quot; floppy disks, which required two trips to the nearest university, as the first time one of the disks was faulty).<p>Still remember that feeling of first typing xeyes &amp; and xlock &amp; and inspecting the result on that 14&quot; color CRT screen (I was beaming more than it, perhaps).<p>Then by winter term 1996 I owned a refurbished HP9000-715&#x2F;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&quot; 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 &#x27;em.<p>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!

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.<p>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.<p>[1] Supporting 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768(interlaced only)

My story about X windows...<p>I was invited to the Atlanta Linux Symposium in the late 90s and met just about everyone around the Linux&#x2F;Slashdot&#x2F;X11 world. I had been hacking on OpenGL drivers and one of the first to &quot;integrate&quot; 3dfx 2d acceleration into X.<p>I had a wonky alpha AXP desktop I&#x27;d built from random parts and porting X11 to 64 bits on Linux as the code &amp; binary was actually still 32bit. I&#x27;m chatting with rasterman for a bit and up walks an older gentleman.<p>He&#x27;d been listening in on our conversation and was eager to get my take on X. I told him straight-up I thought it was kinda crappy and it should have used blah blah bah. He said &quot;I&#x27;m Jim Gettys and I co-wrote X windows..&quot; I was aghast...Oh shit. He laughed and we had a long conversation about how X was implemented.

It took 40 years to get its own social network, for shame.<p>I remember the first time I saw an X terminal in my first year at college. I didn&#x27;t have a computer of my own, and windows labs were overcrowded, so I figured I&#x27;d cut my teeth and learn this Unix thing a year earlier.<p>It was SunOS with twm, and the defaults made the font size unreadably small. I went to the bookstore, bought some Unix beginner&#x27;s guide (I made sure it had an xwindows chapter, since I mistakenly thought I was using an &quot;xwindows OS.&quot;)<p>I spent more time figuring out that environment than I did working on my assignments, but I had a great time. The advantage of working in a lab with older students is I could see what they had on their screen and ask them about it.<p>Lovely memories. Hard to believe I&#x27;ve been an X user in one form or another for more than half of its existence. It already seemed ancient when I first started.

Ha, I didn&#x27;t know the name came from incrementing W. Surprised I haven&#x27;t seen a Y window system. A quick search shows that there have been several, but none successful obviously.<p>Edit: it gets better. Apparently W ran on the V operating system.

Small tip for anyone running a superlight and minimally distracting Linux desktop with X11, i3, and no compositor.<p>Until recently, tear-free video playback necessitated double buffering hacks and older Intel drivers, or using a compositor like picom. Results were always sub-par imo.<p>Along came Mr Sultan Alsawaf: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.freedesktop.org&#x2F;xorg&#x2F;xserver&#x2F;-&#x2F;commit&#x2F;0dacee6c5149b63a563e9bed63502da2e9f1ac1f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.freedesktop.org&#x2F;xorg&#x2F;xserver&#x2F;-&#x2F;commit&#x2F;0dacee6...</a><p>Been running the patch set through Arch&#x27;s xorg-server-git package ever since it came out, and with mpv as player spaceships have never been zooming smoother along the starry sky. For ultimate playback smoothness I scan the video file for dimensions and refresh rate and then set a custom modeline using xrandr to match display timing with media fps, while maxing out the capabilities of the display link.

It was fun to read the recommendation to switch from W to X. I guess we are now back to W :P

Turned out to be adequate for experimentation.<p>I think it&#x27;s interesting they had a CLU binding before C. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CLU_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CLU_(programming_language)</a>

1950s schlock-horror title card: From deep within the labs at MIT, it&#x27;s The Thing That Just Wouldn&#x27;t Die! Shambling onwards for 40 years and counting!<p>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&#x27;s how O&#x27;Reilly got its start) and said &quot;Are you ready to read all of these?&quot;<p>I got by learning the basics of Xlib with the man pages and, I believe, Kenton Lee&#x27;s site. X&#x27;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.<p>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).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;X_Window_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;X_Window_System</a><p>&quot;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 &quot;X11&quot;) since September 1987.&quot;

According to Lindy&#x27;s Law this means I&#x27;ll be ready to switch to Wayland no sooner than 2065.

Seeing X10 was a revelation. I&#x27;d used OS specific windowing systems, and being presented with this one was a significant &quot;aha&quot; moment. Sun Views was interesting but this had a whole quality of anywhere, anytime.<p>X11 was X10++ and I think we&#x27;ve been coasting since. Wayland has confused me.

I think I got XFree86 brought up on like, Slackware or something in the early 90s, I want to say like 1994 but I’m not sure.<p>IIRC there was some terrifying step involved around setting scan frequencies or modelines or something that was advertised as making it possible to set a CRT on fire (which could have been the maintainers being cheeky).<p>Does anyone remember that era well enough to know the details?

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.<p>(May have played an inordinate amount of Netrek on those.)

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&#x27;s Unix) on a PA-RISC chip.

&gt; Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape.<p>Made me smile.

&gt; Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape.<p>What kind of tape would that be in those times?

The comment about documentation made me smile: one of my first jobs was as a UNIX admin and I well remember the enormity of the Xlib programming manuals. Those beasts took up a whole bookshelf.<p>Another memory: joining a bioinformatics lab and encountering a fleet of NCD boxes that could do nothing more than bootp&#x2F;rarp their way onto the network and run an Xserver, with all the processing happening down the hall on a SparcStation. Blew my young mind that network booting was possible, but then again, those were the glory days of Sun, and the Network Was the Computer.

2024 is finally the year of the X desktop

11 revisions later, they ended up at X11, and then time stopped.

I wonder if a Sun, Dec, or HP of the 90s would have had a fighting chance against Windows NT had they not embraced X, and instead developed a local-first stack optimized for their considerable hardware.<p>Related, I&#x27;ve always found it odd that in Linus&#x27; history of Linux, part of it was a desire to implement an Amiga-like OS on a PC. This is the message-passing-bad guy. What happened?

Unfortunately by June 1984 people had already seen the Mac and Lisa.<p>Fortunately 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop, while Apple and Microsoft are busy adding creepy and intrusive AI features.

&gt;Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape.<p>Love it!

I once heard that XWindows predates source control tools. Was it developped without CVS (or any other) ?

Much respect.