[TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux

[Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl>]

That is very quick. X10R3 came out in Feb 1986 (which I understand was the first ‘outside' release) and by 1987 it was already the dominant windowing system? Or did you mean that it had won prior to 1991?


> On 1 Mar 2023, at 17:54, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> It's worth pointing out that X had won before Linux.  I was a contractor
> in 1987, worked on all sorts of different workstations with all sorts of
> vendor provided window systems, and the first thing I did was to bring
> up my trusty X10R3 tape.

> On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>> Thank you for highlighting that!
>> 
>> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent.
>> 
>> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.
>> 
>> 
>>> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>>>> Thanks all for the insights.  Let me attempt a summary.
>>>> 
>>>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.
>>> 
>>> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced.
>>> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments.
>>> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their
>>> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people
>>> used regularly.