On 9/19/17 2:32 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
On 9/19/17 2:23 PM, Nemo wrote:
On 19 September 2017 at 11:39, Chet Ramey
<chet.ramey(a)case.edu> wrote:
On 9/19/17 11:16 AM, Gregg Levine wrote:
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.
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.
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.
This is covered in one of the original Athena papers: The X Window System
by Scheifler and Gettys. I have the full set of "Project Athena: The First
Ten Years"; it's in volume 1. I think that paper was presented at a
couple of conferences, so there are probably copies floating around on the
net somewhere.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu
http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/