Kyle’s Reference Links

A Short History of X

Once upon a time (in the late seventies), the research team in Xerox Corporation's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) invented a way of using graphics to interact with a computer. Their graphics and interface are entirely different than the way graphic interfaces work now, but it was a start of a landslide. Apple was the first company to make graphical interfaces commercially successful, followed shortly by Microsoft.

MIT was the first to seriously develop any sort of graphical program for Unix, developing a W protocol for sending graphics over a network. In May, 1984, Bob Scheifler replaced the syncronous protocol W with an asyncronous protocol and replaced the display lists with an immediate mode graphics, and titled the protocol X. Over the course of the next year, X progressed from version 1 to version 6. In 1985, it was retooled to support color, and was ported to DEC's VAXstation-II/GPX. In September 1985, X9 was released to the world. Brown University researchers ported it to the IBM RT/PC, however a problem reading unaligned data on the RT forced an incompatible change to the protocol, and thus was born X10. In January 1986, X10R3 was made publicly available, and work began on X11.