From: Lars Brinkhoff
It's my understanding it was started by Bob
Scheifler of the CLU group.
Yes, that's correct. (Bob's office was right around the corner from me -
although I had very little knowledge of what his group was up to; I was too
busy with other things.)
I have this vague memory that his version was actually written in CLU? Can
that be correct? It would make sense, since that group was so focused on CLU
- but maybe not, see below.
X must have been done after LCS got the 750 farm (on which we ran 4.1c, to
start with) - although I don't know what kind of terminals they were using to
run X on - we didn't have any bit-mapped displays on them, I'm pretty sure.
Although maybe it was later, once Micro-Vaxes appeared?
I have this vague memory that it was based (perhaps only in design, not code
re-use) on a window system done at Stanford {looks}; yes, W (hence 'X'):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System
The X paper listed there:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/22949.24053
doesn't say anything about the implementation, so maybe that vague
memory/assumption that I had that it was originally written in CLU is wrong.
Liskov's 'History of CLU' paper, which lists things done in CLU,
doesn't
mention it, so I must have been confused?
Do any of the really early versions of X (and W) still exist?
Noel