On June 19, 1984, MIT’s Robert Scheifler sent an email to a group of computer scientists working on the university’s Athena project. “I’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing a window system for the VS100,” he wrote. “I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X… Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel free to get in touch.” Little did Scheifler know that this seemingly simple message would later go down in history as the first public release of one of the most popular and versatile windowing systems ever built.
Much has changed about the X Window System (or just “X”) since that fateful, first day. The underlying protocol has undergone eleven major revisions, implementations of the architecture have been modified to run on dozens of operating systems beyond Unix, and its user base has gone from one — just Scheifler — to millions and perhaps even tens of millions, as developers have whole-heartedly adopted the system as the platform of choice for GUI-based applications.
Surely, without X, both Linux and Unix never would have taken the lead in enterprise computing. But with the system’s 20th anniversary just around the corner, more and more critics are beginning to ask the same question: Can X meet the demands of GUI-intensive applications for…
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