On 26 Jan 2023, at 23:45, Bakul Shah
<bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote:
On Jan 26, 2023, at 2:17 PM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
>
>>
>> Bakul Shah bakul at
iitbombay.org
>> Fri Jan 27 05:39:30 AEST 2023
>>
>> I wonder if this mythical w is the same as V's VGTS as it seems to have
>> pretty much the same model.
>> From
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/357332.357334
And the answer is “no”:
From
https://apps.hci.rwth-aachen.de/borchers-old/cs377a/materials/p79-scheifler… :
"The name X derives from the lineage of the system. At Stanford University, Paul
Asente and Brian Reid had begun work on the W window system [3] as an alternative to VGTS
[13, 22] for the V system [5]. Both VGTS and W allow network-transparent access to the
display, using the synchronous V communication mechanism. Both systems provide “text”
windows for ASCII terminal emulation. VGTS provides graphics windows driven by fairly
high-level object definitions from a structured display file; W provides graphics windows
based on a simple display-list mechanism, with limited functionality. We acquired a UNIX-
based version of W for the VSlOO (with synchronous communication over TCP [24] produced by
Asente and Chris Kent at Digital’s Western Research Laboratory. From just a few days of
experimentation, it was clear that a network- transparent hierarchical window system was
desirable, but that restricting the system to any fixed set of application-specific modes
was completely inadequate. It was also clear that, although synchronous communication was
perhaps acceptable in the V system (owing to very fast networking primitives), it was
completely inadequate in most other operating environments. X is our “reaction” to W.”
The reference [3] is "ASENTE, P. W reference manual. Internal document, Dept.
Computer Science, Stanford Univ., Calif., 1984.”
The version of X discussed in the paper was apparently part of the 4.3BSD distribution
tapes:
"The use of X has grown far beyond anything we had imagined. Digital has incorporated
X into a commercial product, and other manufacturers are following suit. With the
appearance of such products and the release of complete X sources on the Berkeley 4.3 UNIX
distribution tapes, it is no longer feasible to track all X use and development.”
And I was wrong with:
I never really distinguished between the Stanford
"SUN" and the Sun Microsystems "Sun-1”, oops. Taking Clem’s comment into
account I could see that the SUN ran the V kernel and the W graphics system, and that the
Sun-1 was using an early form of X.
Whilst the part about SUN may be correct, the Sun-1 was apparently using MGR and
SunWindows/SunView -- at least according to the interesting blog post here (discussed on
TUHS a few months ago):
https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/10/if-one-guis-not-enough-for-your-sparc.h…