[TUHS] X, Suntools, and the like

[Ron Natalie]

Nice thing about X was that it would talk to remote displays.    I still remember sitting in the Pentagon demonstrating that the Suntools screen lock wasn't particularly secure.
Then there was NeWS.   This was Gosling's first attempt at a deployable language.    However PostScript (even with Owen Densmore's class extensions), while a reasonable intermediary language is really sucky to actually develop.   Java was a bit more refined.

Of course, lots of things either implement X under the native window system or backdoor X with local extensions.    We got around doing high frame rate image work on X via the SharedMemoryExtension and the ability to flip buffers on the retrace interval (both extensions, but commonly implemented by many servers).