[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Paul Ruizendaal]

> On 26 Jan 2023, at 23:45, Bakul Shah <bakul at iitbombay.org> wrote:
> 
> On Jan 26, 2023, at 2:17 PM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at 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.pdf :

"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.html