[TUHS] Early GUI on Linux

[Jonathan Gray]

X10R3 was also included in the 4.3BSD tape

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/contrib/X

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 09:52:32AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 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.
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>