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Old 27th May 2009
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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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.

Last edited by BSDfan666; 27th May 2009 at 12:32 AM.
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