The History of X11

50 thoughts on “The History of X11”

• I couldn't find the thumbs up button that your suggested. I did however find one that came from the opposite direction so I clicked on that one 😉

• xeyes watches what you do and reports to the boss

• X11 feels easier to say anyways

• Awesome!!!😊

• You addressed "X Windows" vs all-the-other-names, but what about Qt? It's supposed to be pronounced "cute" 😉

• I remember X terminals when I was in the Army. Some intel systems back in the late 90s, early 2000s were based on UNIX or VMS both using X window interfaces.

• I remember the Amiga OS having an X11 library

• i called windows in x xwindows

• KDE was kool desktop environment, not kommon.

• Stamford?

• "Gee En You" for a software history channel you'd think he would know how to pronounce these things.

• Adept Robotics had an operating system called V+. Some of the people in that company were associated with Stanford.

• The thing you missed that's going to be another inevitable comment. X Windows was never used on Windows, despite people calling it X Windows!

• found the video after I had few pints
  fell asleep watched the rest in the morning

  I do like how you called out big green for being .. well d.cks when it comes to X and linux / unix drivers

• Nice.

• that was a laugh, thanks😀👍

• I use X on my second laptop (installed Gentoo on a Chromebook believe it or not). It is interesting to know it's history! Great job man.

• I’m younger than most everything that was described in this video — putting aside Wayland, of course. Sometimes I just want to go back and see what early computing was like. Then there are other times — such as when you described how Wayland works — that I remember that things are often better now than they were before…

• Space Karen?

• Very well done historical documentary! You've earned my subscription

• but but what has any of this done for the command line?

• So much of this stuff happened while I was growing up and my time scales were off, that I thought this was all much more working and stable.

• I worked as a student programmer at MIT's Project Athena from 1983 to 1985, and the X Window System was under rapid development during that period. DEC's VAXstation I recall was one of the primary platforms used, and they were networked to the several dozen VAX750s spread out across campus running BSD4.2. There was a lot of creative energy flowing around the project back then (sigh, 40 years ago now), and it's been interesting following the progress of X over the past four decades.

• The documentary I didn't knew I needed.

• Someone hacked out Athena and replaced it with contemporary Windows 9x look. I used X built-in telepresence feature to once pop in an Xemacs screen halfway around the world a decade and half ago.

  BTW was Wayland once the alternative FrameBuffer Server for distros of yore? Never tried it at the time though.

• It's "X". Always been "X". Thou shall not name anything else "X".

• Wayland needs a Keith Packard xwin fork with a BDFL

• I’ve had it on my Mac’s for two decades. And never found out how it bloody works. 😂

• I worked closely with Phil Karlton at SGI. His advice led to the asynchronous architecture in what became SGI ProDev, which carried the company for a year or two. Phil was often opinionated, and invariably had sound reasons. He was brilliant, had limited tolerance for crap, and successfully integrated SGI’s GL window system with X11. Lost touch for a while after I left to co-found HaL, and only learned of his and Jan’s passing from Jim Gettys after the fact.

  A wonderful colleague, mentor, and friend.

• Around 52:14, I see the exactly the same problem preventing me using GNOME, the failure to launch gnome-terminal!

• 🕊️🗽🎵🎶

• One of your best videos ever, thank you for this!

• I have been waiting for Wayland since 2007.

• This was a terrific presentation. I’ve spent hours and hours trying to get my head around X since 1994. I knew it had become significantly better but this really put it together in a very neat way. Thanks!

• It’s Stanford not Stamford. Stamford is a university in Connecticut and doesn’t really have much to do with computer history.

• Didn't you use the hyper productive office montage before?

• Man, I loved X. It made me think I could run stuff from college on my own computer over the interwebs… I mean, I don't know how to do that beyond maybe the calc or clock… but still…

• Excellent, as always. So many memories in this one 🙂

• Wayland cant even properly do icons. You expect it to be useful for anything.

• I think I took the wrong message from this video, because now I want to run PHIGS applications remotely over dial-up, and can't care less about antialiasing and anti-tearing.

• There were actually X servers for NEXTSTEP, Cub'X and co-Xist. Apple even had a X11R5 server called MacX for System 7 and A/UX.

• Very much enjoyed this. Thank you.

• I was tired last night. Started watching it and feel asleep. So had to come back and start back from where i remembered. Wasn't boring at all, i was just tired.

• I subscribed to "Space Karen didn't even invent X"

• I daily drive Fedora (with recent NVIDIA hardware) now i have switched to arch and AMD Radeon and i can agree to Linus and his famous NVIDIA statement…

• Poor NetWare. :Cries in CNE:

• X11 4 ever. I will never migrate to homosexual land

• Very informative, thank you! Do keep it going!!!!

• "It's a UNIX system… I know this!"

• Uggh, Stallman and his cult

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