From <https://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-25-10-questing-quokka-brings-an-array-of-advances-plus-some-trouble/>:

How old is X? I started using it in 1984 on an AT&T 3B2 computer
running Unix System 7 Version 1.

No you didn?t.

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* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

From ><https://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-25-10-questing-quokka-brings-an-array-of-advances-plus-some-trouble/>:

How old is X? I started using it in 1984 on an AT&T 3B2 computer
running Unix System 7 Version 1.

No you didn?t

It wasn't X on the 3BD, it was something call BLIT. The
sam(1) editor was designed for those systems.

BLIT -- Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal.

Used a method called bitblt to do bitmap graphics and
multiple windows. Over a serial line.

Rob Pike wrote sam, iirc.

--- PyGate Linux v1.0
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

From <https://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-25-10-questing-quokka-brings-an-array-of-advances-plus-some-trouble/>:

How old is X? I started using it in 1984 on an AT&T 3B2 computer
running Unix System 7 Version 1.

No you didn?t.

I find it hard to believe the person who wrote the article
used X in 1984. Per Wikipedia X was release in June of
1984.

Unless he actually worked on X at MIT, I really doubt he
used it at all in 1984. I kind of expect, the first
commercial implementation of X was but DEC, and that
happened in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

--- PyGate Linux v1.0
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 10 Oct 2025 16:29:29 GMT, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

I recall pretty well that when I took my first job in 1985, the Sun
windowing system was "Suntools", all the binaries of which were
symlinks to one big blob because Sun didn't have shared libraries
yet so you got all the windowing code to only get loaded into memory
just once that way...

In the early 1980s, DEC?s VMS was the advanced OS compared to most Unixes, with shared libraries, asynchronous I/O, integrated (proprietary)
networking, high cross-programming-language integration etc. That
advantage disappeared within a few years.

One thing Sun came up with, just shortly before X11 was adopted as the industry standard by just about all the Unix vendors, was to create a GUI/ display architecture called ?NeWS?. This was based on PostScript, with
some extensions for interactive on-screen drawing. More than that, it
included a degree of autonomous event handling and lightweight threading,
so that the GUI front-end could be preprogrammed to handle a lot of the
lower levels of user interaction without actually needing to keep communicating with the main body of application code on the CPU all the
time.

Sun merged this into its initial X11 product, then not long after
abandoned it altogether and went full X11. A lot of Sun aficionados were
sorry to see it go ...

--- PyGate Linux v1.0
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 10/12/25 10:40 AM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

Yes I recall NeWS. I think it was a James Gosling project. Unfortunately, it was too late and the momentum was with X11 by then. We were a Sun
shop, but I think the only copy we had was one I downloaded to play with, which I really didn't do much of. As I recall the actual Sun product
that implemented X11 and replaced Suntools was OpenWindows.

A copy was recently located and is now on bitsavers. I had been looking
for this for a while now. The sources are still missing though.

http://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/700-1603-10_NeWS_1.1.tar

--- PyGate Linux v1.0
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 12 Oct 2025 17:40:18 GMT, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

Yes I recall NeWS. I think it was a James Gosling project.
Unfortunately, it was too late and the momentum was with X11 by
then.

As I recall, NeWS slightly predated X11, and Sun rolled the two into
a combined ?X11 NeWS? product for a while. There were those who felt
there was no need to kill one to concentrate on the other.

As I recall the actual Sun product that implemented X11 and replaced
Suntools was OpenWindows.

I thought that was later, as part of the Sun tie-in with AT&T that
scared the rest of the Unix industry so much that they formed OSF.

--- PyGate Linux v1.0
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 10/12/25 11:35 AM, Al Kossow wrote:

On 10/12/25 10:40 AM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

Yes I recall NeWS.ÿ I think it was a James Gosling project.ÿ Unfortunately, >> it was too late and the momentum was with X11 by then.ÿ We were a Sun
shop, but I think the only copy we had was one I downloaded to play with,
which I really didn't do much of.ÿ As I recall the actual Sun product
that implemented X11 and replaced Suntools was OpenWindows.

A copy was recently located and is now on bitsavers. I had been looking
for this for a while now. The sources are still missing though.

http://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/700-1603-10_NeWS_1.1.tar

Slightly tangental is Adobe and Display Postscript, used by NeXT


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On Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:04:13 -0700, Al Kossow wrote:

Slightly tangental is Adobe and Display Postscript, used by NeXT

And the NeXT Cube is, I believe, 37 years old today.

--- PyGate Linux v1.0
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sun, 12 Oct 2025 22:31:52 -0000 (UTC), I wrote:

On 12 Oct 2025 17:40:18 GMT, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

As I recall the actual Sun product that implemented X11 and replaced
Suntools was OpenWindows.

I think you are right ...

I thought that was later, as part of the Sun tie-in with AT&T that
scared the rest of the Unix industry so much that they formed OSF.

... and it was ?Open Look? I was thinking of.

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* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)