reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (02/16/86)
I've always thought that announcements about X should include some explanation of what it is and where it came from--everybody seems to think the whole idea came from MIT. About 5 years ago the Distributed Systems group at Stanford started work on an operating system called "V". V had a window package. My students and I didn't like the V window package very much, so Paul Asente and I set out to design a replacement window package for V. Paul did all of the programming himself, and that gave him the right to name it. He called it "W". The manual for the V system showed a rising sun on the cover (because at the time V ran only on Suns); the manual for the W package showed a rising sun framed by a windowshade. W was an alternative window system for the V operating system. W was a very hot property, and was tens of times faster than the V window system, but it had one fatal flaw. It used V for interprocess communication. In particular, it made the assumption that interprocess communication was very fast. Under V that is a fair assumption; in most other places it is not. Paul Asente took a summer job at DEC Western Research in 1983, and for his summer job he ported W to run under 4.2BSD. The resulting port was very slow because it used 4.2BSD interprocess communication. About 2 years ago Paul sent a tape of the 4.2BSD port of W to MIT for Project Athena. The folks at MIT put a lot of work into it, and in particular they rewrote it so that it didn't use the BSD interprocess communication facility. Unfortunately, they also added 1 to the name, turning W into X, and removed all traces of its origins from the comments in the code. Although the MIT folks have certainly had a major impact on the code of X, its design and internal structure remain quite similar to the one that Paul Asente and I designed 4 years ago, and which Paul subsequently programmed and sent to them. Paul and I would both appreciate it if the people who distribute X would at least explain its history and origins, rather than let the world believe that the whole thing was their creation and their idea. Brian Reid Stanford -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA