The History of X11
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- čas přidán 30. 05. 2024
- X, the windowing system for Unix (and other OSs), based on when you count it from is 40 years old, and its still in use. As Wayland looks ready to take over, its time to look back at how we got X11, what we have done with it, and where it is going.
This video is sponsored by PCBWay (www.pcbway.com)
00:00 - Introduction
00:36 - The Elephant in the room
01:21 - V and the creation of W, which becomes X
03:04 - Why is X the way it is
03:44 - The world Unix grew up in
07:20 - A brief word from our sponsors
08:05 - From weekend hack job, to the future of the GUI
15:01 - X and its license
18:12 - X11 Adoption
22:13 - X terminals
26:06 - CDE
29:53 - The Unix workstation woes
34:24 - Open source starts to take the lead
42:56 - Everything is 3d now
44:40 - DRI
47:35 - Gnome, KDE, and Xorg
51:30 - Time to clean up X
53:50 - Wayland
56:16 - The future of X
57:24 - Thanks - Věda a technologie
Genuinely never called it Xwindows, I always called it X11 or Xorg but an hour about the history of X? This is right up my alley!
Xorg is the name of a piece of software implementing the standard. There are many others, or.. at least have been.
I never felt like xorg felt right as the name. Went my whole life with the X steward being XFree86, the switch was sudden (and driven by idiocy at xfree that they brought on themselves). Just stuck with calling it X.
XWindows is what it was very commonly called in the Unix world before Linux.
@@milohoffman274 Well, I was trained on Sun Unix in uni, and we always called it just X.
@@bobmcbob4399 Same, in uni we had IRIX and just called it X or X11. Generally just X since every app had an X in it (xcalc, xinfo, xbill, etc)
I’m the maintainer of GNUstep. Thank you for the mention. GNUstep is an implementation of Cocoa. We didn’t stop at NeXTSTEP or even OPENSTEP. The framework has a high degree of compatibility with macOS.
Thank you for GNUstep. There was a part of my life where I used it rather heavily.
Oh man! Thank you so much for your work! For a time, WindowMaker + GNUstep apps were my main driver, back when it was Conectiva's default DE. I know they don't exactly mesh, but the look and feel was just right.
Whoa!
Is this like the GNU desktop environment?
@@nexusanphans3813 It's not a DE, it's graphical toolkit and associated apps. So part of a DE. There are DEs built with it, but they are separate projects.
A one hour video essay on the X window system on a Saturday morning? I must be middle-aged because my cup runneth over.
Anatoly Korenchkin checks in.
"Richard Stallman is an incredibly challenging individual " Well put!
He was a guest speaker at my University when I was there. And just from one presentation/lecture/whatever 20 years ago, I had this impression as well.
RMS is our lord and savior. stop whining.
@@jazzochannel incredibly challenging Lord and savior
@@jazzochannel the concept of a root mean square is very useful in electrical engineering, but I wouldn't go that far....
@@jazzochannel RMS eats the skin picked from in between his toes. It's been documented on video.
In 1995, I remember running X windows in my university bedroom on my Intel Pentium 100, running Slackware Linux, and logging into the Unix workstations across town at the engineering faculty (and vice versa) It blew my mind how I could run graphical applications on a number of machines all on the same GUI desktop. My favourite trick was running windows applications via an early version of Wine, from the lab’s Sparc workstation. Looking back it was totally insecure- no SSH, SSL or similar, just telnet and unencrypted X11. Amazing that was nearly 30 years ago!
I used to login to one of uni's sun machines, that had wabi installed and a pentium card, so I could remotely run some windows apps they had installed (mostly autocad).
I was at my university when buddies showed me their Slackware boxes. I was helping run Suns, VAXes, and an SGI parallel computer front end, but my home box was an old Amiga 500 shoved into a tower case. I was blown away that they could take a cheap commodity PC and have something so similar to my office Sun. In 1994, old friends of mine wanted to start an ISP in my home town, and I got on board with that, and got an cash advance to build a Slackware box for myself on a cheap AMD 486. Outside of running RedHat 4.1 way past its sell-by date, I've run Slackware. I now have 64 bit Slackware 15 on a bunch of Core I and Core 2 boxes wired together over a surplus GigE switch. The stuff's pretty dated by modern standards, but it's certainly plush compared with what I've used in the past.
That's because the Internet wasn't infested with dishonest, thieving assholes back then.
I am surprised your network administrator didn't bust your nuts for lagging the entire network.
@@kayakMike1000 On the contrary, I was asked by the college network admin how I got it working, so they could do it too. Also a number of the engineering staff would log onto their faculty unix accounts from X11 servers running on linux on PCs, as supplied of paid for by the university - it was seeming them do this that got me curious in the first place. Running applications over X11 was quite bandwidth efficient, compared to the main alternative available at the time (which was uncompressed vnc)
This episode gets an 11/10 on the nerdy geekometer! 😀👍
Now that's what I aim for :-)
11=3🇺🇸
Greg it's 2024 J27
@@RetroBytesUK Pretty sure you'll struggle to run any X software on an PDP-11/10. TBH UNIX would be hard enough.
Yeah I think after this video I will never be able to talk to non-nerds anymore 🫣😂😂😂
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.
Man of vision has to fight hard to maintain that vision, can come across as a "little abrasive", but is, ultimately, a good human being and a genuine loss when he's gone?
It seems like "all" the "great" computer science projects have a common element...
Thank you for sharing. My empathy for your loss.
Would love to hear more about your work on Unix and Linux, sounds like a fabled past. Sorry for your loss.
Sorry to hear of Phil Karlton's passing, I've seen is name come up multiple times in relation to SGI and their X11 implementation. Out of interest are you the Jonathan Shapiro who was involved in Midori ?
@@RetroBytesUK That would be me.
@RetroBytesUK There's some back story on both the SPARC history and the early Apple processor effort that you didn't cover (or maybe just didn't make the cut). If you have any interest in the role HaL Computer played in the former or the BiiN/i960 effort as context for the latter, drop me a line. I'm easier to dig up an email for than you are. :-)
This video may become the definitive history of X on CZcams
Except that it isn't.
@@luc_libv_verhaegen Sir... I demand satisfaction... r/imrightyourwrong at dawn tomorrow... bring a second
@@luc_libv_verhaegen It would be great if you give us your better candidates for the title. I'd like a lot to watch them.
@@luc_libv_verhaegen r/imrightyourewrong
@@RufianEmbozadoczcams.com/video/k8PaxLYOYdo/video.htmlsi=UC3o5PxS63yOd7WY
I actually never knew why the split between XFree86 and XOrg occurred, thanks for the history lesson.
I remember one sudden Gentoo update saying, essentially: "We're using this now. Licensing stuff." And I had that feeling I _always_ have when I see one of my primary package sets suddenly change names... Uh oh. Is this going to be a quick recompile, or do I need to have eighteen browser tabs open with upgrade walkthroughs, feature comparisons, and example configs?
@@nickwallette6201 Which one it ended it be?
Same, from my perspective the package name just changed.
@@nickwallette6201 Hahaha the eternal fears of the Gentooligan :-D still the same thing to this day!
Oh nice. This is bookmarked for tonight. First get wife and the kids to bed, then crack open a beer and enjoy an hour of my favourite subject - computer history. And yes, I'm serious, I really look forward to watching this.
this is how i get down
Even for an old dog like myself, there was new and interesting information in this video. Loved every bit of it (pun intended). 👍
I think if we are here we are all looking forward to watching this...
Your comment comes off as a lot more genuine then most. it's almost an alien thing to see, giving us a glimpse of your life and existence.
The 'K' in KDE originally stood for 'Kool'. It was the 'Kool Desktop Environment'.
Also, Gnome's abbreviation stood for 'GNU Object Model Environment'. Apparently, something similar to OLE and OpenDoc was was planned originally with this desktop, but was dropped when those technologies turned out to be mostly niche.
yeahhhh, gnome... 1 and 2 I think? (dropped in 3) operated on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), a 1991 design by committee standard. Had lots of buzz words, some possibly cool conceptual aspirations... and didn't really deliver any of them and was a PITA to work with.
The CORBA stuff would have been cool, it would have allowed embedding apps inside each other and network transparency
@@Gooberpatrol66 only someone who never wrote CORBA would say something like this.😀
@@Gooberpatrol66even when Gnome was created, we knew that this was not a good idea. The problem was that Microsoft shined on de Icaza, convincing him that OLE in Windows was a good idea. They did this intentionally, knowing that they were planting a Trojan horse in the Linux desktop. A Trojan horse that was so effective that KDE copied it and tried to “compete” with their own CORBA approach.
Honestly, had the original KDE 1.x path continued, it’s quite possible that Linux desktop would have been far more competitive with MS Windows. KDE 1.x was an extremely smooth experience that focused on the critical usability needs while requiring minimal hardware. It was similar to using Windows 95 at the time, which was high praise then.
@@thewiirocks I think I used KDE 2.x a tiny bit, but really cut my teeth on KDE 3 -- which seemed remarkably stable, complete, and relatively polished. When KDE 4 came out, it was an absolute 😀-show for quite a while. In fact, I dunno if it ever actually got totally back to where KDE 3 was, because I switched from Windows to Mac for my daily driver, and didn't have quite the need for a companion Linux desktop anymore. By the start of the pandemic, it was mostly functional, and only _sometimes_ broke in critical ways, like accepting keyboard input, or allowing clipboard access, etc.
Back in the day it was often emphasized that it was "X" or "X Window" or "The X Window System", but never "X Windows" in plural. Impressive documentary, btw!
@@michael_r Speak for yourself.
My experience working at an outsourcing section of one of the big vendors was that most of our customers called it X windows but that for trademark reasons we were absolutely forbidden from doing so. It was X or "The X windowing system". There were written guidelines we had to follow and everything. That meant that most of us who wrote customer facing documents or anything with any kind of traceable record were pretty good about not saying X-windows but that everyone on both sides of the fence knew that was the commonly used name.
@@michael_r Talking as a former dev and tester for xfree86, we'd most definitely talk about X Windows when discussing things informally.
@@zakpappnaseindeed: why have a rule against it if it’s not happening, after all? They knew it was.
O'Reilly's X Power Tools implied that only the unwashed masses called it X Windows. I made a concentrated effort to stop calling it that.
That diagram with Athena, Motif, and OpenLook brought back memories of my Unix programming days in the late 80’s where I dabbled with all three developing applications for NASA’s Mission Control when it was in the midst of transition from old mainframes and text CRTs to then-modern Unix workstations running 68030s. Good times!
Sun 68030 workstations ?
They were still using CDE as of the Huygens and Juno missions, I spotted it on some screens in a PBS NOVA program about them 😊
@@kaitlyn__L I guess longevity is something NASA really values in the systems they use. I remember an article on an Amiga 3000 based system they had which was still in use about 8 years ago.
Places like Deep Space Network still use a lot of old Unix machines and toolkits. I often see them written in some variant of Athena or Motif. I also saw many things in CERT control and acquisitions systems using them still, as they were developed so long time ago. I also saw few military systems in US use them.
Brilliant stuff, as always !thanks! The security stuff, or lack of, was definitely a product of the times, and only became seen as important as networking grew. I'm old enough to remember broadcast messages on text terminals and ageing academics innocently not realising they were broadcasting to the entire University. One Lecturer found out that he could pop messages up on his wife's screen (same office, sitting behind him) without knowing that 'are you ready to come home, darling' had also appeared on hundreds of other terminals. The replies he got educated him on broadcast mesages, and possibly some other subjects!
🤣
Fun stuff. In school, back in the time of SunView, I wrote a little hack that would make a little marquee message on title bars of my victim's windows. Later when I was a CS sysadm at the same school, I remember being in my adviser's office, and someone ran "melt" or was it "decay" on her X11 based Sun. I recognized the screen hack, and tracked (ps and who are your friends) the culprit, and I ran to the other building, and did the "hello hello hello. what's all this then?" act at his elbow. I think he was surprised how fast he got caught.
And, of course, it wasn't just that you could pop up a window on someone else's display. You could trivially snapshot it with xwd -root, and if you wanted to do a little work, much more than that. There *were* security mechanisms, but they required some user intervention; I'm sure plenty of people here remember "MIT Magic Cookies".
I remember we had a brand new "terminal jockey" at our offices, and we'd start up "xroll", connected to his X Terminal. His screen began rolling as if the hync was off, and he kept adjusting (with the rotating buttons on the rear of the monitor and slapping his monitor to try to correct it... Those were the days :)
I remember xroach, and the first time i saw it happen on my display. Howls of laughter were had!
Great video, with the most minor of corrections: when discussing the V Distributed System at 2:00, you show a picture of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where V was developed, but you also show the seal of Stamford University of Bangladesh. The Stanford University seal has a redwood tree in the center.
A bit of trivia: the tree is named Palo Alto (tall tree). The city of Palo Alto was named after the tree, which still stands, though not as tall as it once was.
Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk! 😁
I recall writing little C programs for Xlib almost 25 years ago. It was cool to be able to compile them and they's work on both MIPS/Irix, Sparc/Solaris, and X86/Linux systems, but it was anything but cool to write for native Xlib. Instead of showing unseemly things on people's X displays, we had programs that would gently jiggle people's mouse cursors, driving them mad.
programming something for wayland is an apsolute nightmare
@toedsalmon Not that writing raw Xt and Xlib is a walk in the park. I'm rewriting a greeter I wrote for XDM which had better cosmetics and special key stroke handling such as being able to shove a system into suspend by typing a certain key combo. Sadly, Slackware moved to PAM, and the greeter was a simple event loop. Event loops and callback systems tend not to play nicely together. (Grumble pout!)
I remember seeing an X11 system for the first time. I was flabbergasted. Mind you, I just switched from the printer terminal to vt100/vt220 terminals. Big screen, multiple terminals. This was genius.
We had to prevent clients from coming into our development areas because they'd see the NCD 19 inch X terminals and demand that we sell them one of them because one of our salesman did. I had to write something that allowed them to easily click and connect to the two servers and run our applications then I had to document how to use a mouse, resize windows, and so on.
Oh, of course they didn't have Ethernet to the office where this X terminal would be. Oh, it was also across the street from the mainframe. So we had to run a fiber optic cable (expensive back then) hundreds of feet connected two Ethernet/fiber converters, all for this *one damn X terminal* that we didn't even officially sell. Good God!
I'm a younger linux user, switched to it a few years ago, and other than xwayland I've never run x11 in my life. this was a pretty interesting deep dive into the topic thanks!
Be happy you've never felt the _absolute pain_ of having to manually debug a broken */etc/X11/xorg.conf,* wondering why GNOME or KDE isn't starting up after logging in, or why your 3D games are suddenly only running at 11 FPS. 😭 Especially in the early to mid 2000s, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace was your best friend (restarts the X server in case it locks up or a display config change needs to be applied).
I am quite pleased with Wayland on GNOME as my current daily driver, especially where input latency, 3D graphics acceleration, and laptop battery consumption are concerned. Feels very slick and lightweight compared to Xorg, IMO. Missing protocol features aside, Wayland runs like a dream on all my machines these days.
Come on, don't make me feel that old! I only beat the death of X11 by three years!
good for you... for me, thanks novideo still (olderish novideo cards don't work at all, tried noveau which while decent for reverse engineering, is like 5x slower)
Free BSD is the only reason I even know xorg even existed.
Be very glad you didn't have to debug a broken xorg.conf like I did on my crappy laptop in 2008. I'm so glad Wayland is a thing now! My displays run buttery smooth and my laptop sips less power compared to my Xorg session. We've come a long way.
I'm watching this with TWM as my window manager.
Do you still have the X stipple background as well?
I have TWM as a basic fallback, but PekWM has been my jam for well over a decade now.
Why wouldn't you use VTWM?
@@belg4mit Good thinking, but I have 4 monitors at home and 5 at work. I hate virtual screens and always disable them where possible.
I used tvtwm for several years in the 90's, like the esthetics of it. 😁
Absolutely love it. Maybe we could hear you talk more about the history of GNOME and KDE in a future video? This stuff is sadly lacking in-terms of historical explanations.
Oh, and the political/licensing stuff between GTK and Qt. And the people going their own way with XFCE. And the GNOME devs going totally bonkers, necessitating the fork that is Mate.
@@FindecanorNotGmail Xfce is both my favorite and my personal recommendation plus the most peaceful and wholesome community of them all. Love the Xfce folks. I'm sure they'd be down for an interview or to talk about their history. Probably not convoluted like other desktop environments or window managers.
Objection to the bit at 51m30s about running an X client with a remote display: yes, it's still a valid use case, and a nontrivial number of X users do it every working day.
Another thing worth pointing out is that LBX was a failure overall, not just because our connections have gotten faster. It didn't do a very good job of raising throughput, and it didn't address the matter of X clients performing a bunch of two-way operations in series at application startup. You can read more in Keith Packard's paper, _LBX: A Port-Mortem_ .
X11 could be compiled to handle different networking stacks. TCP/IP was most common but I remember seeing code in there for DECNet and there was even a development effort for ISO networking.
Used to work on full flight simulators. The IOS (Instructor Operating Station) that controlled the whole thing was a thin client using X11. I always found the display forwarding in X11to be a really neat solution.
Now there is a nice project to have gotten to work on.
@@RetroBytesUK It was... most of the time. I didn't build them, just maintained them (24/7 kinda operation). But the place was like a computer museum. We had a bit of everything, VAX, AIX, SUN, SGI and loads of custom stuff running weird UNIX-flavors... And loads, and loads, and loads of VME. I'm not even gonna mention the visual systems because that was some really bespoke stuff. We even had one of those Tektronix 4010 vector terminals... and this is like 2010-ish time frame. The oddest of them all was a GP4 that ran the Fokker 28 sim - of 1978 vintage. The newer sims ran on RedHat.
I was once hired to do work on an app that was "distributed" by every user having a remote X connection to a central server ... or "clients" (whatever). You could say that was an abuse of X's network transparency, but it worked remarkably well for that app.
Since I left, it has moved to a web-based interface that uses React.
it was fun blowing peoples minds in college - log into a Sun workstation and have some apps running locally, a few on the larger SparcCenter (primary Unix host for campus at the time) but having all of their GUI windows right next to each other on your Sun workstation. So powerful!
Dutch railways had a similar setup for central train control. Bunch of Alphas running the control software and a bunch of X servers to create a multi monitor set-up.
One of the coolest moments in my career was in 1991. I was at a client in Hawaii and I connected my laptop directly to the X desktop in my office. The screen on my laptop (eventually) looked exactly like the one I had left. I was able to work just like I was at work although quite a bit slower since we only had dialup modems back then. Of course now remote desktops are standard and essential stuff.
Been a Linuxer for over a decade but never really knew the history of X11. Now I know! Loved the video, thank you much for sharing with us!
As someone who built X applications (HP/UX, AIX, SunOS) back in the '90s, thanks for the trip down memory lane! I recall building something in display Postscript on an SGI box in university as well. I'm still using those event-driven programming skills today... like literally today 🙂
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.
I started with X11 in 1987 on DEC VAX Stations. It was an interesting time to be working with this, it's amazing how it's come along and how much it's still being used. The idea of a networking graphics protocol is amazing, even now.
It's also interesting following the decline of programming quality over the past four decades. It still amazes me how much faster something like xedit executes compared to something like Mousepad (standard XFCE editor). I know why it's happening, I'm not blind to modern software development requirements (=as fast and cheap as possible), but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
I'm chagrined that it is only now, 30+ yrs after the fact, that I start to understand how all that project athena stuff worked.
@@tomlouie2855 It was really groundbreaking stuff. I started work with X11 and Xt back when it was all still in beta and the only documentation was a set of very opaque white papers out of MIT. I don't think that there are that many people who really understand X11 even to this day,
@@ChristopherHailey the general lack of documentation only made things sweeter when there was documentation. I remember reading manpages and trying out every option available for a command.
Ah, the memories of typing startx at the command line! Thank you!! 😆
xeyes... xclock... And hours of playing xpilot with colleagues on our xterminals, at the end of the business day. All that X goodness and more!
My university used to have a dedicated room with a selection of different Unix workstations. DEC, IBM, HP, Next, Sun, ... it was open for everyone and if one of the machines was occupied you went to the next. So every day a different kind of Unix... with a common network file system (AFS) it was no problem, because most programs ran on all of those platforms. And if not... an X session to the machine required was always possible.
I can remember seeing all the windowing systems (Motif, CDE, TWM, etc.) on real machines. That was almost 30 years ago...
And I finally understood what DRI and wayland is about. Thank you so much for that video.
Edit: I even wrote some Phigs applications back in the time... wow. Never thought of hearing about that ever again.
I wrote 1 thing with phigs just to try it out. I got alot working with very little effort, however I soon realised I was limitted to doing with phigs what I had accomplished in the first few hours. It was fun, but I can see exactly why opengl killed it.
Back in the early 90s our computer lab was mainly Sun systems still on SunOS. The default X11 was X11R5. So a few of us would rsh over a few dozen machines on a cat and mouse game to display junk on their desktop. R5 had no xauth. That came with R6. I had X11R6 running on my session to foil the others in this game. One I figured out how to edit /var/utmp without corrupting it to hide my trail the fun really began.
amusing anecdote from the early 90s - I was working at DEC Australia, and had been using a VAXstation 3100 with DECwindows, an X11- based windowing system.
a mate of mine bought a (then) brand new Windows 3.0 machine, and wanted to show off his new toy to this nerd. I got there, sat down and started using it like a boss. he was gobsmacked, "how did you know all that?", "oh," I replied, "I've been using something similar at work for a number of months now - it's pretty cool once you get used to it."
didn't get invited back :/
This explains so much of the weird old names i saw every once in a while when i heavily used a linux desktop in my university days. Ill always remember the time i actually used the remote features of x to use an application from a workstation in the computer lab from my laptop across campus.
I'm very glad that Cinnamon is finally starting to work on implementing Wayland.
Great video. I can't explain the sense of wonderment when I found you could run X programs remotely and display locally at University, early 90s. And yes I was one of those annoying pendants who corrected people who called it X Windows, after I found my previous usage had been wrong. We had NCD Xterms. And I made my 486 PC into one to access HP 9000 systems. In those days you had to configure X with a text file, literally calculating line and frame timings by hand for a particular resolution/frame rate. There was a warning in the readme saying if you got it wrong it might damage your monitor.
I was never really a programmer, but as a structural engineer I did find myself using Apollo workstations in research and later Dec Alpha which all had X windows. This video was really helpful at putting everything into place in a very interesting way. Thank you.
I only got to use an Apollo workstation once or twice, after they had gone under and where owned by HP, and it was still not a bad machine. They must have been quiet impressive when new. I also loved my Alpha workstation, it was my favourite platform for a long time.
I'm not sure if it's fair to say Apollo went under until after HP acquired them in 89. They were pretty much the #1 or #2 workstation company but the writing was on the wall when mgmt said they needed to slow the growth.
On topic it used to take an entire weekend to build X from source on a single box. Thankfully you could fire up a distributed make across all the machines in the network. @@RetroBytesUK
Welp, I'm sold on Wayland now. Might have to give it another shot soon.
It was nice to hear some of the details of X's history, plus the bit of general Unix history as well. I've been maining Linux for over a decade, but never really knew much about what lead up to it. Even this brief glimpse of it was fascinating.
If you have the right graphics card, Wayland is certainly worth trying. If you have an Nvidia, it might be worth trying on a few select distributions where they are very upto date on drivers, and Wayland versions. Also reverting back to X11 on those distros is fairly easy if your card does still not want to play nice. On any of the LTS distros Nvidia is still a bit of a nightmare when it comes to wayland unfortunately. We are just at the point that Wayland on nvidia has just become reasonable.
This is super nerdy and right up my alley! Perfect Saturday morning video. Thanks RetroBytes ❤
did you get an Itanium cpu or did you go amd for the win?
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!
I got into Linux 20 years after that and was baffled about why X11 referred to stuff as servers and clients. This is the only video that's made it make sense. It literally WAS clients and servers back then. They just got it to work on one system.
It was very good.
Now, that part I kind of got because I knew about X terminals early on although I didn’t fully appreciate the genius, but this really filled in the gaps on the WHY.
"It's 1986 and the internet is pants."
I just love British slang. Great video! You had me at, "This video's gonna be long, it's gonna be nerdy."
Great video.
I worked in a university library in the early 2000s and one of ny favorite things to do was looking for outdated IT books to read.
This video reminded me if that.
The Unix Haters Handbook is a fun read ^.^ Even if you do like *nix.
@@GoogleDoesEvil sounds interesting. I'll check it out, thanks!
@@GoogleDoesEvil Agree. I read that back when I was starting an ISP, and used Linux at home and Solaris at the office. The book has a lot of snark, but having worked with Lisp and Smalltalk, I could see many of the points (sharp ones at that).
@@GoogleDoesEvil just ordered it!
What a superbly well assembled video. I can see this being teaching material for a long time. I would love to see a deeper dive into Wayland, as an X user for 20+ years, it's so good to see Wayland grow into a really competent platform.
I have been resistant to moving to Wayland because when I have used it in have encountered issues that don't exist in xorg like complete crashes in Wayland that take the kernel down with it. In my experience so far Wayland has seemed rather unstable, to the point of being basically unusable in some cases. I certainly see the need for modernization, but it has seemed like many distros have been jumping into using Wayland before it was stable enough for production use. As of today, Wayland is looking a lot better, but it still has issues that show up pretty regularly.
The real magic of X11 could be seen in Sun’s Sunray system. It was so cool. We even had laptops called “tadpoles” that were made by a defense contractor.
You could take a smart card that contained a token that linked to your frame buffer and see your X11 display. But, you could take your smart card home with you and, like tuning into a cable tv channel, your screen would instantly appear.
Sun was Sunray’s biggest user base. It was killed when oracle bought Sun.
Sun Rays are super cool, a vision of the future that could have been, but the protocol between the server and the framebuffer/thinclient wasn't X11, it was some proprietary protocol like RDP or ICA for shuffling bitmaps around IIRC. We do still have VDI and other systems for doing similar things, but Sun Ray worked well and it's sad that it's not around anymore.
My first X11 server was Quarterdeck's DESQView/X networked to another PC running Mark Williams Company's Coherent.
Most of the X11 applications were compiled from source from USENET, plus some my custom TCL/TK software used for creating charts from screenshots.
The coolest thing was once the X11 server on SLS Linux was stable enough I was able to reverse the setup & run legacy DOS & MS Windows 3.11 applications on the first box networked displaying on Linux's X11 server.
Great video! Nerd meter was set at exactly the right level of history and technology. I worked at a company developing applications that had to run on all of these platforms and frankly in retrospect it was a miracle that it worked.
What a great deep dive! My first exposure to X11 was as a teen messing around with Linux in the late 90s - mucking around with XF86Config just to get the server to run, and then right into the wild world of fvwm config tweaking. It all seemed so alien to a kid coming from DOS & Windows -- which makes a lot of sense given the history.
Dr. Cheriton (V, W) was one of my undergrad computer science profs when he was at the University of B.C.
My first real non-playing-around use of X was running an X server on a PC with X client apps on a DEC Ultrix workstation. We all thought twm looked slick.
At 2 minutes into the presentation, the narrator s video shows text about V being developed at Stanford University in California USA; however, some graphics designer put the seal for StaMford in the video here to confuse everyone?
Stamford is a city in Connecticut USA on the east coast and has nothing to do with California's StaNford University. 😮
I just figured it was a running gag. Obviously Stanford has da treez... 😊
And the logo is seemingly the logo of a Bangladeshi university LMFAO. Not even an easy to find university too!
Stamford is a town in Lincolnshire founded by Anglo-Saxons by a Roman Road. In the fourteenth century it was briefly the site of a rival university to Oxford and Cambridge.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamford,_Lincolnshire
The MIT license wasn't the problem, and GPL wasn't the solution. The commercial UNIX vendors wouldn't have all contributed their code back into a GPL codebase. They'd have continued to use their own versions. The extensions were also MIT licensed. As mentioned in the video, when XFree86 tried to switch to a more restrictive license, everyone abandoned it in favor of maintaining their own forks of the last version before the change, until Xorg emerged as the new de facto standard, which didn't matter much to users, except the name is a lot more fun to say.
It's fascinating to dive into X's history at the time of its end, basically. X11 had (or still has) problems with getting enough people to fill the committee team. Wayland is taking over, except for ChromeOS (but I heard they are working on it, but it might not be Wayland). X is an incredible piece of software. I do not remember You mentioning one can still do X-forwarding through SSH, which is very convenient. Nonetheless, great job. It was a pleasure to devour this video in one sitting :)
Wow! What a great video! I didn't realize the history of X/X11 was so long and deep. Great information.
“It’s got a widget, a widget it has got”, Reference acknowledged
Fantastic tour of my computing history. Got my first PC in the mid-90’s and was running Linux and XFree86 setups from about ‘96. I’ll never forget the first time I configured the XF86Config file, I was pretty scared I’d gotten modelines values for my monitor wrong. The warnings at the time being, Be Careful with these, your monitor might explode. I ducked behind my chair as I pressed the Return got to launch startx. Thankfully I was presented with a mesh background and X cursor. Many many happy and frustrating years of configuring X and various window managers and desktop environments followed. Thanks for the in-depth history, major nostalgia for all this.
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.
You forgot one of the UNIX vendors... HP, and HP-UX. I was a UNIX sysadmin decades ago in a heterogeneous environment of HP 700/800 servers for the software programmers, Sun for the engineering group, AIX for the business groups, and an SGI server (just because, I guess). Each group had their own servers in the data center, and used either NCD X terminals or diskless HP 700 desktops as X terminals to share their application servers (and keep their usage loading complaints amongst themselves and their own budgets). Then, the company decided to go to diskfull HP 700 desktops with their own local HP-UX.
Oh, the joy of first explaining that the X server was on their desk, and the app server was in the data center, and then reexplaining that their app servers were on their desk now, and not to power cycle the now diskfull machine to "fix" a perceived "issue" (oh, the crashed disks and corrupted O/Ss).
I had a co-worker sysadmin that always wanted to play with the latest and greatest desktop environment, while I always stuck with CDE. He asked why, and I said that my users used CDE, so I used CDE, to investigate/understand their issues.
Since I had Sun users in the engineering group, I did take a Java and an X/Motif class.I was amazed when Linux came out (good old Slackware on multiple floppies), and then Solaris x86 (using Cygwin on my Windows box was getting old).
Ah, the memories...
As with so many of your videos (and other people’s retro stuff) I lived through this era, but never had the big picture. It’s amazing to see what was actually driving all the stuff we buying and using. I’m 58 and man I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff in this industry. I’m so glad that people are acknowledging its importance and documenting it for posterity. It’s the history of our shared nerd culture. And, heck, now the normie culture too.
I use remote X all the time!!! Life-changing capability!
What a fantastic and well-researched video, as always. Thank you. I've been using X since the mid 90s as an intern. Like (I suspect) many here, I've written XFree86 config files from scratch. Been there, done that, have the modeline scars.
I will definitely miss X's seamless network transparency. Being able to forward X over SSH to run remote programs in individual windows that integrate seamlessly with my current desktop; *without* needing admin access to install/configure/run remote services on that remote host, is *incredibly* useful. Setting up VNC or RDP or NX on a remote server is a real pain, and opens up yet another point of entry on the server, and often requires.. ahem.. careful negotiation with the IT department. My hope is that at some point wayland gets a remote solution that's as easy to use as "ssh -X". I know it's an old discussion though.. has there been any updates on this in the past few years? or is the advice still "just run vnc/rdp/nx"?
May it live forever
In 1998 I was studying in Montréal but my girlfriend was in Sherbrooke. So I found a computer room with Unix machines there, and remotely worked on my Sun desktop computer in Montréal, using X11 and XDMCP. Applications were running in Montréal and the GUI windows were displayed in Sherbrooke. It worked very well... Except that I kept forgetting about being remote, and sent print jobs to the local printer in Montréal!
Very thorough presentation. It must have taken an enormous amount of time to put this video together. Bravo to the creators.
Saturday morning treat. Way better than Live & Kicking.
Thank you for this. Watched it from start to finish and I ally got a grasp of all the idiocy behind the historic unix fragmentation over its graphical environment.
Saw this scrolling through my feed this morning while mostly asleep, finding something to listen too, and thought it was a fever dream video, but no, it's real, and I couldn't be happier.
But hey, bring on wayland
This may have already been said but TWM was originally the Tom’s Window Manager and then changed to the Tabs Window Manager
Yes, (well, "Tab Window Manager") and you might also remember CTWM (Claude's TWM) and VTWM (Virtual TWM, which managed virtual screens). Who also remembers piewm (with pie-shaped menus), or my then-favorite, GWM, the Generic Window Manager, which allowed you to essentially "Theme" (though GWM preceded the popularity of that term) everything about your WM by writing its behavior and appearance in a dialect of Scheme (an extremely close relative to LISP). Good times.
I'm almost glad he didn't bring up X Resource files, the method in Xt for customizing the toolkits. As powerful as it was complex and unfriendly (at least to non-programmers).
@@drgiller I'm no programmer and I can handle X resources. I have 78 lines in my resource file for xcalc alone. I like color coded buttons.
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…
The vast majority of Vax minis ran VMS, not unix, and VMS was originally a command line OS. The VaxStations ran X on VMS or Dec's unix, called Ultrix. I hated Motif, it was really clunky. We always called it X11. XFree86 was fun to get working - I remember shopping carefully for a graphics card that *might* work with my pile of Slackware CDs - and being scared to death that I might fry my monitor if I screw-up the parameters. Having the window manager actually start-up felt like a huge accomplishment!
Hay, don't slight Tom! TWM was originally Tom's Window Manager. I used this back in 1986 at Uni. The X Consortium later renamed it Tab Window Manager, but to many of us, it always was and always will be Tom's.
Other than poor Tom, it's a very good video. Bravo!
Yes, and later called Tab Window Manager. I rather liked it back in the day....
I remember using NeWS on a Sun 3/260 that was part a Postcript RIP for some large format printers. When SunOS 4.1switched to X it felt like such a step back at first until we discovered that we could work on a workstation not in the print room and it was still faster than being sat at the original SunOs 3 RIP console... Bliss :D On an unrelated note, I'm not sure your assessment of the X MIT license is correct. If it had been licensed with GPL then it's extremely unlikely that many of the larger Unix vendors would have picked it up in the first place. I'm also not sure that it's entirely true that the vendors code bases became "closed source" once they started building their bespoke additions. Great video! Keep up the great work.
Having stuffed the red book into my brain a while back, I wish I had had the opportunity to play with PostScript on NeXT or Sun NeWS.
I agree to some extent. Large companies only realized that GPL was "good for business" much later in the game, by the late 90s and early 2000s. Before that it was seen as this " hippie" thing that some nut jobs in the academia were pushing for and they avoided it like the plague due to the fear of the viral nature of GPL. But the fact that the MIT license literally puts no obligation whatsoever onto the licensee makes it too easy for people to enhance the original code and keep their enhancements to themselves as a way to differentiate and that's largely what many commercial entities do when using BSD or MIT licensed open source software. Unlike GPL, they do little to encourage actual sharing and collaboration. It is not hard to see how each vendor eventually ended up going their own way until they realized that some consolidation was necessary and both motif and CDE became a thing.
Great video and I really like your channel. Back in the 80’s and 90’s I used to work and program on the big DEC, IBM and Tandem machines. The company I work for still has one software vendor that uses an X11 client on PC and Mac. I used to use X11 a little back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s on Sun computers. I never had to program for X11 and I never really knew much about it until now, except that it worked good enough but nothing too fancy. I have more respect for it now.
When Packard's photo with the clipped head came in, I half expected the Monty Python cartoon hand to came down and pluck out his brain.
I am on my way to Esktilstuna to look at some steam engines and I have some breakfast at Donken, the weather is excellent and I see this, seems like a good day.
Inte eskilstuna 💀
Brilliant video. "Space Karen" Musk :D Great to see BZFlag! We played that a lot on NT4 back in Uni. If you need a windowed GUI, run Windows. For everything else there is headless Linux.
Awww, the joys of of logging into other machines in the classroom, starting xosview, seeing it magically on your screen and then launching a fork bomb. Good times.
The good old fork bomb.
BackwardsNostalgia, here...
In '99 I was starting my IT career helping to replace the school district's VAX system with Win2K... We were setting up W2K machines where previously there were VT100 terminals in school offices and the administration building. W2K servers in nearly every school.
When we got to the Bus headquarters, though, I saw something I thought was the future... They drew-up bus routes on this awesomely huge screen mounted in the desk for transparency overlays drawing out maps with a pen... WAY more sophisticated than a friggin' mouse. And when I asked about it they said it was a dumb graphics terminal, that the actual programs were running on a server just like the dumb text terminals.
Wait, WHAT?!
Must've been a highly sophisticated server behind that thing. Surely significantly more powerful than a dumb ol' W2K servers we were installing!
I didn't realize until YEARS later, the same ancient Vax handling all those dumb terminals was also running that graphical thing over a friggin' modem across town.
I had that job for a decade... when I left in 2009 the Vax still hadn't been fully replaced. In fact, a major factor in replacing the VT100s with W2K boxes was installing a proper VT100 emulator that connected to the Vax downtown via T1 (and ethernet) rather than modems and RS232.
The software tools they needed just didn't exist for Windows, even in 2009.
Another major hurdle, as late as 2007 as I recall, was that Outlook's contacts system, tied into Active-Directory, couldn't handle more than 30,000 contacts, which we'd quickly exceeded! How could *that* be used worldwide as the corporate standard?!
Really great video. I was first exposed to X11 in 1992 when I started my computer science degree and we used SGI Indigo workstations running IRIX, a few Sun Sparc machines, along with 486 PC farms running eXceed. After graduating, the next 2-3 decades I found myself developing on Windows NT based OSs and later Macs, and only fairly recently switched to Linux as a 'daily driver', so it's nice to see what's happened in those tween years. Now I have to get my head around Wayland!
My first job out of college was writing graphics software on a Chromatix tied to a DEC miniVax running VMS (virtual misery system) for a flight simulation facility in MD. It is so easy to forget how much work was required to just get platforms to talk to each other let alone produce anything meaningful to a user. This history of X11 was wonderful!
Great video as always, i think this might be on of the most informative channels on youtube when it comes to the history of computer development, keep up the good work :)
Thank you for this, it's so hard to bring together a cogent view of X11 over its lengthy history.
nostalgia. what a walk down memory lane. i lived through it all.
thank you.
I'm always so fascinated by your videos and the amazing level of detail you get into! Yet again, I have watched this video and felt /satisfied/ at the end! Thanks!
The first time I saw X was on a NCD Xterminal - crazy stuff a xTerm being a virtual terminal in a window was crazy as before then I had 4/5 hardware terminals with v24 connections. Great video and so pleased you took the time to document this history. TY!
This, sir, is going to need me to settle into a comfy chair and go into full on memory-lane mode. I still did programming on X11 - not Motif or any of the toolkits, but the lowest layer! It's what taught my about event driven programming, state management, inter-process communication, better than my uni courses ever did. Those massive O'Reilly tomes had a place of honour on my bookshelf just for shows, for years! Sadly, they did not "survive" one relo quite some time ago.
Love the V reference!!! Great miniseries!
Been waiting for this as a x display server fan
Mmmmmmmmh sweet old memories, yesss! I've always called it X Window, no s, and then any combination of: just X, Xorg, X10, X11, X system, X display. Long live X!
X11 demistified. I liked it. Answers a lot of questions about what it's all about and how we got here. Thanks.
thanks for mentioning windowmaker. I'm still using it after so many years, I really feel i'll never replace it.
I've tried other DEs and WMs but Window Maker does everything I need. Which really isn't much.
I thought I knew something of the history of X, being someone who's been using it since the very early 90s, but it was nice to get a much more in-depth understanding of where it actually came from!
Thanks for this vid. I ran down this "what happened to 80-90s unix" rabbit hole earlier this year, and came to the same conclusions. Made me wonder if/how things could've been done any differently - how could things go.
I had to fight a bit of cognitive dissonance because the voice and music made my brain expect a jovial retrospective of British pub snacks across the last 3 centuries yet here it was receiving a deep history lecture on software that I've been using for almost 20 years. Good shit. If I were still a pothead I'd roll the video into a blunt and hit it on the balcony in this winter chill while silently nodding to myself.
Fantastic video. Thank you for the great content! Ive been using X for the same 35 years as you just recapped. thank you for that walk down memory lane. 😇
Very good GUI history summary
Another great video, thank you sir! The HPUX desktop environment brought back some memories. I'd max out the number of virtual desktops to six and name them after the six members of Monty Python. Happy (nerdy) days.
I l loved the (brief) security discussion around the 37 minute mark. When I worked for Sequent Computer Systems in the 1990's we had lots of "fun" using the `xset` command to do things like change the mouse acceleration or screen blanking interval of a coworkers X terminal. Obviously the novelty of such pranks wears off quickly but it did illustrate the insecurity of protocols like X11 (and telnet, ftp, etc.) from that period in computing history.
This was great! Loved that you even went into the wayland stuff, that was really interesting to see how it's transitioned!
Great documentary, thanks! Watching this while enjoying a nice coffee with my MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE 😊
Fantastic video, I had no idea of the early history of X. It's sad to see X finally going, but obviously it is necessary to be replaced by something more modern.
This level of documentary should get an award! Thank you so much for your work putting all this together and presenting it so well.
Fantastic video, really interesting stuff! Thanks for going a bit in depth with the protocols, I actually got a better understanding of the differences between X11 and Wayland watching this.
I remember writing the 3270 emulator for the Oracle n|c (the StrongARM one) and using LessTiff. OMG that was ugly/awkward/nonsensical, but at least the shared memory extension meant rendering the actual terminal window was fast enough. Great video on the history, thanks!
I used the the 3270 emulator for the Oracle nic, we had a few at TPLC. We used it with our ICL mainframe system and our warehousing application Popums. I seam to remember it been a nice terminal emulator, I think it even handled programmable fonts properly unlike one of the windows terminal emulators we where stuck with.
@@RetroBytesUK If I may ask, what was "TPLC"?
@@RetroBytesUK Might have been mine! I remember that mine was more comprehensive than the actual IBM-sourced one, and ISTR the company that sold it was "Idea" somewhere on the east coast. I can't look at 122 key keyboards without getting cold sweats now.