1 Mar
2023
1 Mar
'23
6:52 p.m.
It was the answer for me, I wanted "sameness" across platforms (which was
what Unix was advertising and then the vendors all diverged into their
"value add").
I can't believe that 1987 was my first exposure to bringing up X, pretty
sure I had done it at UW-Madison for the same reasons. But maybe not,
I dunno, it was a long time ago.
All I know is that, at the time, X10R3 was the only hope I had of getting
the same dev environment no matter what I was working on.
Whether I had brought it up or not at UW-Madison, I had been using some
version of X for years, at least 5 years and probably more, prior to
going out in industry in 1987. And that wasn't my doing, UW-Madison
was very much a hackers school, a good one, and they had X-something
running on everything, micro vaxen, RTs, Suns, everything.
So it wasn't like 1987 happened and I "picked" X over some alternative,
it was already the answer well before that, years and years before that.
I know I was running it as an undergrad.
On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 06:22:49PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
That is very quick. X10R3 came out in Feb 1986 (which
I understand was the first ???outside' release) and by 1987 it was already the
dominant windowing system? Or did you mean that it had won prior to 1991?
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
On 1 Mar 2023, at 17:54, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
It's worth pointing out that X had won before Linux. I was a contractor
in 1987, worked on all sorts of different workstations with all sorts of
vendor provided window systems, and the first thing I did was to bring
up my trusty X10R3 tape.
> On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>> Thank you for highlighting that!
>>
>> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by
1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X
because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
>>
>> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided
the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application
ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on
Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as
little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
>>
>>
>>> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
>>>> Thanks all for the insights. Let me attempt a summary.
>>>>
>>>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because
what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
>>>
>>> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
>>> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
>>> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
>>> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
>>> used regularly.