19 Sep
2017
19 Sep
'17
8:34 p.m.
Chet Ramey writes:
On 9/19/17 2:23 PM, Nemo wrote:
For what it's worth, I just looked in some old notebooks. I have a number
of the V papers, and also some papers on VGTS which preceeded W. I'm sure
that I have some of the W docs around somewhere but that'll take some more
hunting.
On 19 September 2017 at 11:39, Chet Ramey
<chet.ramey(a)case.edu> wrote:
As I understand it, Scheifler began with W, which Paul Asente and Chris
Kent had ported to Unix and given him a copy. He initially replaced its
synchronous protocol with an asynchronous one and went on from there.
I don't know whether IBM was involved with the V OS research, which was
where W came from, or resisted its public release, but Scheifler
certainly got a copy.
Jon Steinhart covered a little bit of this in a message to this list
last week. On 9/19/17 11:16 AM, Gregg Levine wrote:
I vaguely recall (assuming no bit rot) that IBM was also involved and
they refused to release their portion under FRAND terms, leading Bob
to write X. Hello!
Wasn't the original project called "Athena", and wasn't it pursued
by
one of the many Labs at MIT?
The athena project was indeed at MIT, and X was a part of that. This
would have been started and developed during the mid-1980s (1983, to be
exact). X's predecessor was a window system named W, which was developed
at Stanford. Bob Scheifler used W as the basis for X.