[TUHS] Early GUI on Linux

[Larry McVoy]

It was the answer for me, I wanted "sameness" across platforms (which was
what Unix was advertising and then the vendors all diverged into their
"value add").

I can't believe that 1987 was my first exposure to bringing up X, pretty
sure I had done it at UW-Madison for the same reasons.  But maybe not,
I dunno, it was a long time ago.

All I know is that, at the time, X10R3 was the only hope I had of getting
the same dev environment no matter what I was working on.

Whether I had brought it up or not at UW-Madison, I had been using some
version of X for years, at least 5 years and probably more, prior to
going out in industry in 1987.  And that wasn't my doing, UW-Madison
was very much a hackers school, a good one, and they had X-something
running on everything, micro vaxen, RTs, Suns, everything.

So it wasn't like 1987 happened and I "picked" X over some alternative,
it was already the answer well before that, years and years before that.
I know I was running it as an undergrad.

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 06:22:49PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> That is very quick. X10R3 came out in Feb 1986 (which I understand was the first ???outside' release) and by 1987 it was already the dominant windowing system? Or did you mean that it had won prior to 1991?
> 
> 
> > On 1 Mar 2023, at 17:54, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > It's worth pointing out that X had won before Linux.  I was a contractor
> > in 1987, worked on all sorts of different workstations with all sorts of
> > vendor provided window systems, and the first thing I did was to bring
> > up my trusty X10R3 tape.
> 
> > On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> >> Thank you for highlighting that!
> >> 
> >> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
> >> 
> >> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
> >> 
> >> 
> >>> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> >>>> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
> >>>> 
> >>>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
> >>> 
> >>> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
> >>> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
> >>> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
> >>> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
> >>> used regularly.

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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat