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Old 28th May 2009
fbsduser fbsduser is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666 View Post
TerryP said XFree86 & Xorg primarily targeted x86 PC's, and he's right Oko... XFree86 only started in 1991, guess what the 86 in XFree86 is representing?

X Window does have origins well before both XFree86 and Xorg, and it was primarily used on high end Unix workstations in the late 80's.. various commercial vendors have had their own forks of X that developed independently of the free reference implementations.

In the early 90's there were a couple different commercial Unix-like operating systems for x86 (..even some for 16-bit 286 processors), users of said operating systems would dial into local BBS's.. if Internet was available they could access FTP servers to obtain binary releases of XFree86.

Same goes for the 80's, people using non-x86 Unix workstations would lurk around on Usenet or other sorts of mailing lists.. back then they likely had university access to the Internet and had to obtain the X source directly from MIT's FTP servers, compiling it manually.

Looking at the X10R3 tarball that's available at ftp.x.org, many of the files are dated 1985/1986.. 4.3BSD and Ultrix-32 appear to be the only supported operating systems at that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11#Release_history

It looks like there was at one point a port of X for DOS, can't find much information about it though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
With all due respect that is just grossly inaccurate statement. It could not be further from the truth.

X has been created at MIT as a part of Athena project when PCs barely existed for the type of machines popularly known as Unix workstations. What we call today PC is a grandchild of 1983 IBM attempt to get into micro computer market which was until then dominated by start ups and mish mash hardware. PCs (micro computers) have not been taken seriously by X, Unix, VMS and if you like computer community at large at least until late nineties and the demise of large proprietary Unix vendors as DEC, SGI, and if you like SUN. Please !!! we have not had any PC machines at the universities in U.S. probably until 2000. It was all SUN, SGI and aging DEC hardware.

PCs have never been created as multi-user machines. Why would PCs need network ready X server? They didn't have any graphical interface to speak of until mid 90s and Windows 1995. X traditionally required Unix or VMS as underlining OS. I am not aware that X was ever ported to DOS but I might be wrong about it.

Unix has been ported to PCs by Microsoft (Xenix) which ditch it in favor of much less hardware hungry DOS because
PCs could not run Unix shell let alone Unix+X.

BSDs have traditionally being hacked on HP risk stations and SUN hardware. Marriage of BSDs and if you like Unix
with PCs is marriage of convenience not love. Nothing could make me more happy than to see rise of another RISK
based hardware vendor targeting workstation market.

Whole idea of X being for PC is such Linuxism that it just makes me mad
There WAS an X11 for DOS. It was called Desqview/X and required the memory manager "Qemm" version 9.x for proper operation.
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