On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 9:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms
and Emacs windows.

In fact that's pretty much what I do to this day: I do everything in terminals and do browsing etc. elsewhere.

At that point, X windows wasn't *flaky* per se, but rem If you got
the calculations wrong, the image might not be stable, but that wasn't
a software bug so much as it was a configuration error.

However, most configuration errors can't reduce your hardware to a useless pile of junk, whereas older CRT monitors could definitely be destroyed if the configuration was too far off nominal.