X window system

[Grant Munsey]

I am consulting for a company that is interested in using the
X window system. Is there anybody out there that has information
on X?

Thanks, Grant Munsey
decwrl!turtlevax!grant

[I'm not overweight...I'm undertall.]

In article dated 14-Feb-1986 by Grant Munsey, he states:

>I am consulting for a company that is interested in using the
>X window system. Is there anybody out there that has information
>on X?

The X-Window software was produced through a joint effort between DEC
and MIT's Project Athena. It originally ran on the VAXstation-100
workstation/terminal (which DEC no longer sells) and was then ported to the
VAXstation-I, VAXstation-II, and finally the VAXstation-II/GPX. X-Windows
was a research tool originally. It has now been incorporated into
ULTRIX-32w, an ULTRIX windowing system available from DEC and supported by DEC.
(ULTRIX-32w is "layered" on ULTRIX-32m, the ULTRIX available for uVAX).
It is not currently available on VMS.

X-Windows is a very simple, pliable windowing environment. It provides a
window model as well as an input model for workstation peripherals. The
X server process communicates with the hardware and provides the model that
applications see. The user interface (or window manager) is merely an
application. ULTRIX-32w comes with a window manager developed by the ULTRIX
group. However, this can be replaced at customer installations if desired.

Applications are provided with subroutine libraries that facilitate
communication with the X server and perpetuate the model(s). The connection
between application processes and the X server is a socket connection,
which under ULTRIX has been optimized when the communicating processes are
on the same node. However, this permits compute-intensive applications to
run on different nodes than the X server (or workstation) node.

ULTRIX-32w is currently available from DEC with its terminal emulators,
window manager, server software, device drivers, and associated programmer's
documentation. There are also some sample applications around, but I don't
know if they come with the kit. X-Windows is still evolving and will be
available on future workstations from DEC as well.

Steve DiPirro
Digital Equipment Corp.

[Jay Lepreau]

The current release of X also runs on Suns. A port to the "PC/RT"
will be done soon, and support on other machines is in the works.
Because DEC and MIT have made the source available for not much more
than the price of a tape (it will also be in 4.3 as contributed
software), X may well become the dominant window system out there.
Contrast this to Andrew, a similar but probably more mature window
system from IBM's center at CMU, which IBM only lets out to Universities.

Kudos to DEC, the opposite to IBM. And similarly to MIT and CMU--
apparently MIT insisted that its industrial collaborators in Project
Athena make all software publicly available, but CMU did no such thing
with the ITC.