[TUHS] Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS

[Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3963 bytes --]

A couple of years after Athena got going the Andrew project at CMU got
started.  That project focused primarily on early Sun workstations.  There
was some fooling around with some sort of Unix on the PC/AT, but the lack
of virtual memory support and the weakness of the networking cards for the
machine meant that we never saw them.

My memory of how X evolved is a bit confused, but there was a collaboration
between Athena and Andrew.  Each had built window systems independently.
My recollection is that Gosling, Rosenthal, and Sidebotham built the core
of the CMU one.  It introduced the separation between the display engine
(the ‘server’) and the application (the ‘client’) using an ancestor of the
X Protocol.

After a while a consolidated window system was agreed, using front end
ideas from the MIT W system and the CMU wm system and preserving the X
Protocol.  This produced a flexible architecture that allowed an
application to run anywhere and display in a window anywhere else.  It also
made networking support a must.

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 11:41:12AM -0500, Rich Salz wrote:
> > > Aa for the questions of the UNIX-ness of X, it started in Athena,
> which as
> > > I understand it was supposed to be relatively OS-agnostic distributed
> > > computing? In any case, the predecessor ran on a different OS, not
> sure how
> > > significant that is to the genesis of what would be called X or what
> OS it
> > > "started" on.
> >
> > Athena was about scaling up Unix workstations. It was started with grants
> > from IBM and Digital. It was never OS-agnostic.
>
> Well..... technically Athena was about computing in higher ed.  If you
> go far back enough, at the very beginning, we used VAX 750's and IBM
> PC/AT's running DOS.  As soon as the Microvax 2's and IBM PC/RT's came
> in, about 2 or so years in, Project Athena switched to Unix
> workstations, but in the earliest days (which would have been pre-X
> Windows), Project Athena had not yet standardized on Unix or
> workstations for that matter.
>
> The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
> via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
> telnet from IBM PC/AT's.  The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
> they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
> otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
> right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
> to based on the starting character of your last name.  (And graduate
> students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
> although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
> dedicated systems, of course.)
>
> One of the perks for being hired as a student systems programmer back
> then was that you got accounts on all of the Vax 750's, so you could
> use any terminal room across campus.  :-) We then would either rlogin
> to our "home" Vax 750, or we had scripts that would replicate our home
> directories across the various 750's.
>
> There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
> BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
> operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
> all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.
>
> "AIX: it *reminds* you of Unix...." was the saying at the time ---
> although we tried not to say that when the IBM engineers assigned
> Athena were in hearing range :-).  The one saving grace of the IBM
> RT's was that they were three MIPS machines, while the Microvax's were
> but a single MIPS, and that made a huge different if you were running
> TeX or LaTeX.
>
> Cheers,
>
>                                                 - Ted
>
-- 
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4839 bytes --]