From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jon@fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 17:14:17 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] X and NeWS history (long) In-Reply-To: References: <201709111649.v8BGnGTx005812@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <20170911230910.GH7819@mcvoy.com> <201709120738.v8C7ckOF007026@freefriends.org> <201709121535.v8CFZOuB015695@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <201709122211.v8CMB3pf029787@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: <201709130014.v8D0EHEi021561@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Adam Sampson writes: > Jon Steinhart writes: > > > I think that I'm the only person to write an X server outside of the X > > Consortium. > > 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! Cool, thanks for the info. Based on the date, this was probably X10, not X11.