From: Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl>
To: Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org>
Cc: "tuhs@tuhs.org" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2023 21:39:11 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <34B2F3A7-B2A2-4597-8181-6A291CE3BEB1@planet.nl> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7wh6w9alam.fsf@junk.nocrew.org>
> On 29 Jan 2023, at 07:48, Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:
>
>>>> I'd like to know what the first versions of X were written in
>>> Without the earlier versions' source, it's hard to answer this question...
>>
>> V source code exists, right? It seems likely W would have been written
>> in the same language as W. And that early X would also be the same.
>> Another source of information would be to ask Bob Scheifler and Jim
>> Gettys.
>
> I asked Bob, and he says W was written in C.
Thank you!
In the meantime I have also found the thesis of William Nowicki, the author of VGTS:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA166935.pdf
It has a timeline for VGTS in its appendix C. In short, development begins in 1982 as a carve out of the display routines of a VLSI design package. It seems to have become usable in 1983 and development continued into 1984 (Nowicki graduated in March 1985).
This places the development of W in 1983 (before that VGTS did not exist, and by early ’84 a Unix version existed).
This https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA231239.pdf document from 1990 claims:
"The X Window System has a very alphabetical lineage. The family originated at Stanford University as the VGTS, or V system, a primitive networked graphics windowing system. Then Digital Electronic Corporation desired a more advanced version of V and worked with Stanford University to develop W. Because of the needs of a networking and windowing project sponsored by IBM at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT acquired the W system and greatly improved its networking capabilities.”
The above seems not quite accurate: besides the V / VGTS mixup, Scheifer writes that W was more a simplification rather than an extension of VGTS:
"VGTS provides graphics windows driven by fairly high-level object definitions from a structured display file; W provides graphics windows based on a simple display-list mechanism, with limited functionality. We acquired a UNIX-based version of W for the VSlOO (with synchronous communication over TCP produced by [Paul] Asente and Chris Kent at Digital’s Western Research Laboratory.”
However, the links with DEC that these paragraphs make are interesting. There is this blog post from Bryan Lunduke (https://lunduke.substack.com/p/w-the-window-system-before-x-that) makes a link between the W window system and DEC’s 1984 "VAXstation Display System Software”. It is possible that these two pieces of software are in fact closely related.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-01-29 20:40 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 56+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-01-26 15:58 [TUHS] " Paul Ruizendaal
2023-01-26 16:04 ` [TUHS] " Larry McVoy
2023-01-26 16:37 ` emanuel stiebler
2023-01-26 16:51 ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-01-26 16:29 ` Clem Cole
2023-01-26 22:17 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-01-26 22:45 ` Bakul Shah
2023-01-27 0:19 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-01-27 17:16 ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2023-01-27 17:36 ` Warner Losh
2023-01-27 17:37 ` Warner Losh
2023-01-27 17:45 ` Rich Salz
2023-01-27 17:54 ` Warner Losh
2023-01-28 9:14 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-28 11:05 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-01-28 15:38 ` Warner Losh
2023-01-28 18:50 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-29 6:48 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-29 20:39 ` Paul Ruizendaal [this message]
2023-01-27 17:43 ` josh
2023-01-26 16:51 ` Warner Losh
2023-01-26 18:15 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-26 19:39 ` Bakul Shah
2023-01-27 10:59 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-26 18:14 ` Jon Steinhart
2023-01-26 20:44 ` Rob Pike
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2023-01-29 23:20 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2023-01-30 0:25 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-01-30 5:23 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-01-30 8:45 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-01-30 9:22 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-01-31 11:35 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-01-31 23:29 ` Chris Hanson
2023-01-30 13:00 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-02-06 7:01 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-02-06 8:39 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-01-26 13:15 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2023-01-26 0:31 [TUHS] " Joseph Holsten
2023-01-26 0:51 ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
2023-01-26 1:06 ` Luther Johnson
2023-01-26 1:15 ` Jon Steinhart
2023-01-26 1:01 ` Larry Stewart
2023-01-26 13:25 ` Marc Donner
2023-01-26 13:58 ` arnold
2023-01-31 2:03 ` Mary Ann Horton
2023-01-31 17:43 ` Marc Donner
2023-01-26 1:12 ` Tom Lyon
2023-01-26 1:47 ` Chris Hanson
2023-01-26 7:20 ` John Cowan
2023-01-26 7:33 ` Dave Horsfall
[not found] ` <CAD2gp_QtUPmd78yAixvKK1wzPX67HKZXzU5cJnVUbcWtMounGQ@mail.g mail.com>
2023-01-26 16:35 ` John Foust via TUHS
2023-01-26 17:58 ` Jon Forrest
2023-01-26 18:04 ` Jon Steinhart
2023-01-26 9:52 ` emanuel stiebler
2023-01-26 9:58 ` Rob Pike
2023-01-26 10:09 ` Jaap Akkerhuis via TUHS
2023-01-26 15:14 ` Clem Cole
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=34B2F3A7-B2A2-4597-8181-6A291CE3BEB1@planet.nl \
--to=pnr@planet.nl \
--cc=lars@nocrew.org \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).