[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Paul Ruizendaal]

> On 29 Jan 2023, at 07:48, Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
> 
>>>> I'd like to know what the first versions of X were written in
>>> Without the earlier versions' source, it's hard to answer this question...
>> 
>> V source code exists, right?  It seems likely W would have been written
>> in the same language as W.  And that early X would also be the same.
>> Another source of information would be to ask Bob Scheifler and Jim
>> Gettys.
> 
> I asked Bob, and he says W was written in C.

Thank you!

In the meantime I have also found the thesis of William Nowicki, the author of VGTS:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA166935.pdf

It has a timeline for VGTS in its appendix C. In short, development begins in 1982 as a carve out of the display routines of a VLSI design package. It seems to have become usable in 1983 and development continued into 1984 (Nowicki graduated in March 1985).

This places the development of W in 1983 (before that VGTS did not exist, and by early ’84 a Unix version existed).

This https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA231239.pdf document from 1990 claims:

"The X Window System has a very alphabetical lineage. The family originated at Stanford University as the VGTS, or V system, a primitive networked graphics windowing system. Then Digital Electronic Corporation desired a more advanced version of V and worked with Stanford University to develop W. Because of the needs of a networking and windowing project sponsored by IBM at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT acquired the W system and greatly improved its networking capabilities.”

The above seems not quite accurate: besides the V / VGTS mixup, Scheifer writes that W was more a simplification rather than an extension of VGTS:

"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 produced by [Paul] Asente and Chris Kent at Digital’s Western Research Laboratory.”

However, the links with DEC that these paragraphs make are interesting. There is this blog post from Bryan Lunduke (https://lunduke.substack.com/p/w-the-window-system-before-x-that) makes a link between the W window system and DEC’s 1984 "VAXstation Display System Software”. It is possible that these two pieces of software are in fact closely related.