From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: jon@fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2017 11:34:47 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] old X versions
In-Reply-To: <8e0ad468-ddc0-72b8-e1fb-3111f6c33314@case.edu>
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Message-ID: <201709191834.v8JIYlR9018972@darkstar.fourwinds.com>

Chet Ramey writes:
> On 9/19/17 2:23 PM, Nemo wrote:
> > On 19 September 2017 at 11:39, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey at 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.
> 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.

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.