[TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 09:52:32AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Whether I had brought it up or not at UW-Madison, I had been using some
> version of X for years, at least 5 years and probably more, prior to
> going out in industry in 1987.  And that wasn't my doing, UW-Madison
> was very much a hackers school, a good one, and they had X-something
> running on everything, micro vaxen, RTs, Suns, everything.

Paul gently took me to task in private and pointed out that my timeline
doesn't make sense, there is no way I was running X anything in 1982.
And he's right, there were a number of years on vt52 and vt100 and
whatever was the heath one, I loved that terminal because you could code
it to put status in the 25th line.  A lot of time on terminals connected
to a Vax 780.

I was an undergrad from 1980-85, grad in 96 and 87.  I'm pretty sure
I was running some version of X as an undergrad, probably as a senior.

But not for 5 years before I graduated as I said so my bad.  I'm a
fisherman, the fish get bigger every time I tell the story and the years
I used X back in the day get longer :)

Whatever the details are, I left Wisconsin with X as my dev environment
and I believe I brought it up on Suns, HPs, SGIs, Linux of course,
maybe SCO (I might have skipped that and just used console ttys, the
SCO I used was warmed over V7) and who knows what else.

X was to me in windowing as Unix was to me in operating systems, they were
what I wanted simply because I got more work done in those environments.

--lm