From: Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
Cc: Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl>, tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2023 12:17:25 +1100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <Y//5Jatht7p41pW2@largo.jsg.id.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230301175232.GF26409@mcvoy.com>
X10R3 was also included in the 4.3BSD tape
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/contrib/X
On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 09:52:32AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> It was the answer for me, I wanted "sameness" across platforms (which was
> what Unix was advertising and then the vendors all diverged into their
> "value add").
>
> I can't believe that 1987 was my first exposure to bringing up X, pretty
> sure I had done it at UW-Madison for the same reasons. But maybe not,
> I dunno, it was a long time ago.
>
> All I know is that, at the time, X10R3 was the only hope I had of getting
> the same dev environment no matter what I was working on.
>
> 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.
>
> So it wasn't like 1987 happened and I "picked" X over some alternative,
> it was already the answer well before that, years and years before that.
> I know I was running it as an undergrad.
>
> On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 06:22:49PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> > 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.
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-03-02 1:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 57+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-02-25 21:31 [TUHS] " Paul Ruizendaal
2023-02-25 22:49 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
2023-02-26 1:27 ` Larry McVoy
2023-02-26 0:39 ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26 1:14 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2023-02-26 15:50 ` Leah Neukirchen
2023-02-26 16:13 ` Larry McVoy
2023-02-26 16:23 ` Leah Neukirchen
2023-02-26 16:32 ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26 16:39 ` Will Senn
2023-02-26 19:58 ` Dave Horsfall
2023-02-27 0:16 ` Adam Thornton
2023-02-27 10:09 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-02-26 2:21 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-02-27 17:22 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-02-27 18:32 ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26 2:27 ` Will Senn
2023-02-26 2:30 ` Will Senn
2023-02-26 2:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
2023-02-26 3:28 ` Dan Cross
2023-02-26 3:45 ` Warner Losh
2023-02-26 5:24 ` John Cowan
2023-02-26 5:36 ` Steve Nickolas
2023-02-28 3:35 ` Dave Horsfall
2023-02-27 17:22 ` Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2023-02-27 17:59 ` Arno Griffioen via TUHS
2023-02-27 18:07 ` Warner Losh
2023-02-27 20:04 ` [TUHS] Generational development [was Re: Re: Early GUI on Linux] arnold
2023-02-27 20:08 ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
2023-02-27 20:22 ` arnold
2023-02-27 20:46 ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-02-27 21:04 ` Dan Cross
2023-02-28 7:59 ` arnold
2023-02-28 15:28 ` Clem Cole
[not found] ` <CAP2nic1STmWn5YTrnvFbexwwfYWT=pD28gXpVS1CVSfOOwxx7g@mail.gmail.com>
2023-02-28 15:50 ` [TUHS] Fwd: " Adam Thornton
2023-02-27 20:50 ` [TUHS] " Chet Ramey
2023-02-27 20:55 ` Bakul Shah
2023-02-27 21:01 ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-02-27 21:15 ` Chet Ramey
2023-02-27 21:22 ` Dan Cross
2023-02-27 20:30 ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Dan Cross
2023-02-28 1:10 ` Alexis
2023-02-28 1:27 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-01 16:39 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-03-01 16:54 ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-01 17:22 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-03-01 17:52 ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-02 1:17 ` Jonathan Gray [this message]
2023-03-02 4:28 ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-02 6:46 ` [TUHS] X timeline Lars Brinkhoff
2023-03-01 18:59 ` [TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux Theodore Ts'o
2023-03-02 7:27 ` arnold
2023-02-28 1:08 ` Jonathan Gray
2023-02-28 1:15 ` Clem Cole
2023-02-27 20:56 ` Will Senn
2023-02-27 22:14 ` Andru Luvisi
2023-02-27 22:31 ` David Arnold
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