[TUHS] Early GUI on Linux

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> 
> 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.

One of the critical applications that a lot of us needed were being
able to view postscript and dvi files.  Sure, in the Unix days you
could take a 'roff file and typeset it using either troff/ditroff or
nroff, but if you are downloading a paper which was published as a
postscript file, or you are authoring your problem set for a MIT math
class (where the recitation instructor was too lazy to create their
own answer sheet, so students competed to have their problem sets to
be reproduced as the official answer sheet for that problem set, so
some of us took to typesetting our weekly problem sets using TeX or
LaTeX), you really want a graphical windowing system.

> > It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to
> > appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal,
> > clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one
> > (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around
> > 1995. Anything broadly used before that?

I was typesetting problem sets using xdvi as early as 1987-1988; using
the IBM PC/RT as well as VAXstations as an undergraduate.

So if it was just xterm and emacs, maybe you could use alternatives
like screen, tmux, mgr, etc.  But as Larry and Dan have said, what
folks wanted was a home Unix "workstation", and by the late 80's, X
Windows had clearly won, having dominated alternatives like Sun's NeWS
and NeXTSTEP.

					- Ted