[TUHS] old X versions

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/19/17 2:23 PM, Nemo wrote:
> On 19 September 2017 at 11:39, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey at case.edu> wrote:
>> On 9/19/17 11:16 AM, Gregg Levine wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>> Wasn't the original project called "Athena", and wasn't it pursued by
>>> one of the many Labs at MIT?
>>
>> The athena project was indeed at MIT, and X was a part of that. This
>> would have been started and developed during the mid-1980s (1983, to be
>> exact).  X's predecessor was a window system named W, which was developed
>> at Stanford. Bob Scheifler used W as the basis for X.
> 
> I vaguely recall (assuming no bit rot) that IBM was also involved and
> they refused to release their portion under FRAND terms, leading Bob
> to write X.

As I understand it, Scheifler began with W, which Paul Asente and Chris
Kent had ported to Unix and given him a copy. He initially replaced its
synchronous protocol with an asynchronous one and went on from there.
I don't know whether IBM was involved with the V OS research, which was
where W came from, or resisted its public release, but Scheifler
certainly got a copy.

Jon Steinhart covered a little bit of this in a message to this list
last week.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/