I’ve spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up.
The original mailing list announcement of the Linux kernel gets regurgitated quite often, but I had never seen the original announcement for X. Fascinating.
What is this VS100 system mentioned? It’s not the Wang VS100, is it?
No, that was the VAXstation 100, a Motorola M68000-based graphics terminal that attached to VAX systems running VMS or Unix.
Ah. That makes much more sense. The Wang VS100 didn’t seem to be the right type of system for this.
The original announcement was sent on 19 June 1984.
Almost 40 years later… “there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up”.
Even Windows has https://www.osnews.com/story/134456/windows-11s-device-manager-finally-uses-os-path-instead-of-a/
“This is not the ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good starting point for experimentation.” 😀
And for many, it just continues to get the job done…and I am one of those. Now granted, I do cherry pick my multi-monitor setup where all the monitors are the same size and type, but X drives them easily with LXDE as my desktop. Some day I might give KDE & Wayland a try, but as of today, I have no need…just an interest in trying something different.