The X Window System, Version 11 Release 1 is now available. This
release represents a major redesign and enhancement of X and signals
it's graduation from the research community into the product engineering
and development community. The X Window System version 11 is intended
to be able to support virtually all known instances of raster display
hardware and reasonable future hardware, including hardware supporting
deep frame buffers, multiple colormaps and various levels of hardware
graphics assist.
Whereas the design and implementation of the first 10 versions of X
were primarily the work of three individuals, Robert Scheifler of the
M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science and Jim Gettys of Digital
Equipment Corporation and Ron Newman of M.I.T., both working at M.I.T.
Project Athena, X version 11 is the result of the efforts of literally
dozens of individuals at almost as many locations and organizations.
At the risk of offending some of the players by exclusion, several
people deserve special credit and recognition. First, Phil Karlton
and Scott McGregor, both of DEC, for their considerable contributions
to the specification of the version 11 protocol. Dave Rosenthal of
Sun Microsystems also contributed to the protocol and provided the
sample generic color frame buffer ddx code. Sue Angebranndt, Raymond
Drewry and Todd Newman of DEC's Western Software Laboratory, with
Phil, have worked long and hard to produce the sample server
implementation. Our very deepest gratitude to Todd Brunhoff who
convinced his management at Tektronix to spare him for 6 months to be
at Project Athena. Todd's system knowledge, his bag of tricks and
never-fading smile were essential in keeping the beta test alive. Bob
Scheifler remains the author, the final arbiter and the final decision
maker for the X Protocol itself, a job that has consumed significantly
more time with the expansion of the design community. Jim Gettys has
allowed his arm to be twisted to continue to be the principal
architect, arbiter and implementor of Xlib long after he wanted to
move on to other tasks.
Many thanks to all the beta test sites who persevered and helped us to
achieve this milestone. Our enormous gratitude to Dave Rosenthal,
Erik Fortune, Raymond Drewry, Dave Gorgen and Al Mento who with us
spent many late nights during the past week merging sources, testing
builds and revising documentation.
The full list of contributors who made this release possible is very long.
In order to avoid filling mail queue, the complete list is in the file
X11/doc/contributors. It is recommended reading.
This release is unique and perhaps historic in the computer industry
in that very nearly all of the code has been contributed by the
workstation vendors themselves. This release will run on the Digital
VS-2, VS-2/RC, VS-2/GPX and VS-2000 under Ultrix 2.0, and 4.3BSD, most
Sun Microsystems workstations with bw2 and cg2/3/4/5 displays under
3.2, 3.4 and 4.0, Apollo Computer workstations under SR9.5/6/7, and
the IBM RT/PC with AED and APA16 under ACIS 4.3 (Not under AIX). MIT
does not "support" this distribution; however bugs and fixes and new
code are gratefully accepted.
To order a distribution, send a CHECK for U.S. $150 to:
MIT Microcomputer Center
MIT 11-209
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139
(617) 253-6325
Purchase orders will NOT be accepted. The distribution will come on a
single 9 track 1600BPI tape written in Unix tar(1) format, along with
a single copy of printed documentation. Other distribution media or
formats are NOT available. Express mail shipment will be available
at a surcharge; you should call the number above if you desire this.
Distributions are also available from "zap.mit.edu" (18.72.0.126) (for
east-coasters) and decwrl.dec.com (26.7.0.16) (for west-coasters) on
the Internet, via anonymous FTP. The east-coast distribution will be
moving soon from 'zap.mit.edu' to 'athena-dist.mit.edu', so if zap is
unavailable you should try there.
Bug reports should be mailed to xb...@athena.mit.edu. It would be
appreciated if you used the template in doc/bugs/bug-report.
As always, in the spirit under which X was developed and is
distributed, you are encouraged to write your own tools and share them
if you think these clients are deficient.
Enjoy!
15-Sep-87
Bob Scheifler
Jim Gettys
Ralph R. Swick
Todd Brunhoff
MIT Project Athena
