Re: [TUHS] X and NeWS history (long)

Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> writes: When I was doing my PhD a few years ago, one of the case studies I used was an X11 server that was written in occam 2 by Colin Willcock at the University of Kent at Canterbury. I managed to recover Colin's source code for the X server (in Transputer Development System format), which is dated November 1988, from a very dusty machine backup... I also found the sources for Colin's 1991 report to the funding body on the completion of the project, and his 1992 PhD thesis which describes the same work. I rebuilt these in 2010 using a modern version of TeX, so the appearance is probably different from what Colin intended (and the cover-page dates are definitely wrong), but they're quite readable: https://stuff.offog.org/cw3-report-rebuilt.pdf https://stuff.offog.org/cw3-thesis-rebuilt.pdf Note in particular the motivation stated in the report: "The worst of these problems was the MEiKO C compiler, which (by mid-1988) proved incapable of making any significant headway when presented with the public-domain X-sources. [...] After consultation with the project monitoring officers at RAL, we took the decision to investigate the prospects for a complete re-implementation of the X-server in occam 2, making no use of the public domain C sources." There have of course been other X server implementations more recently, but they're less historically interesting!