[TUHS] old X versions

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/19/17 2:32 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> 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.

This is covered in one of the original Athena papers: The X Window System
by Scheifler and Gettys. I have the full set of "Project Athena: The First
Ten Years"; it's in volume 1. I think that paper was presented at a
couple of conferences, so there are probably copies floating around on the
net somewhere.

-- 
``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/