[TUHS] What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Thu Dec 7 01:23:02 AEST 2017


On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 7:00 PM, Robert Swierczek <rmswierczek at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I am also interested in the early development of networked GUI's that
> led to the X Window System.  According to Wikipedia there was a W
> Window System that predated X.

W which was done at Stanford and is definitely related to (direct parent
of) X Windows.   Cheriton of course is the place to start, although I've
lost track of him.  He's in the valley somewhere, he made billions funding
Google ;-)

V Kernel and the Stanford University Network (SUN) terminals were all
developed around the same time as W.

FWIW: Gettys & Schiefler might have of the W ​sources squirreled away - as
they started with them at MIT; but rejected it as the base for a set of
reasons which I forget now; but did take a number of the ideas. Jim showed
me a demo of early X and W side-by-side a long time ago.  IIRC the basic
site protocol and the approach where the 'server' was on the local system
and the 'client' was remote came from W. [I'll try to ask Gettys what he
has off-line].

Clem
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171206/da44b01f/attachment.html>


More information about the TUHS mailing list