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X GUI

Fifteen Years of X 255

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ain't-that-cool dept.
An anonymous reader wrote in to say that X was originally announced at MIT fifteen years ago today. The original announcement is attached below if you're curious. If they knew where it would be today!

From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler)
To: window@athena
Subject: window system X
Date: 19 Jun 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday)

I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up.

We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now actively building applications on X. Anyone else using W should seriously consider switching. This is not the ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C interface is in the works. The three existing applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O interface, and a primitive window manager. There is no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to volunteer? I may get around to it eventually.

Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945 first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel free to get in touch.
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Fifteen Years of X More

Fifteen Years of X

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  • The other potential X Windows replacement under development is Berlin [berlin-consortium.org]. I haven't really looked at it, but it is a real project under active development.

    As far as I can tell the Y Windows pages are just design documents. There's no code for download. That and the date of the last news (February 1998) suggests nothing ever came of it, which is a shame as the things they were suggesting (sane colour management and direct video access instead of X protocol requests for local clients) all seem fairly sensible IMO.

    Berlin actually looks rather more ambitious, being based on CORBA and a very OO model. Unfortunately X probably won't be replaced anytime soon because of the massive existing base of applications. You can be sure whatever replaces it will still be lumbered with having to be able to do X emulation...

    Andrew

  • This old beast needs to be slain (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    15 years of tacking on more code, adding more bugs. This is one of many programs that would be enhanced if it started from clean slate (Several Mickeysoft Operating Systems included). Kill the beast!
  • The whole deal about X being bloated is not so... For example, Windows :) takes up about 100 more meg than X, WITHOUT any GOOD software, and gives you a complimentary crash every few minutes... I personally like how X runs, and it's features... It's fairly fast, just as fast as the others, if not faster...

    If you want to put the Windows Virus on your computer that's up to you ;)

    Plus, if X took up twice the disk space as windows I'd still use it :)
  • Posted by stodge:

    15 years, and surely past its sell by date. Must be time for a replacement?
  • Posted by d106ene5:

    What I'm looking for here is any clue that you actually have any idea what you are talking about or of you are simply picking up on the "x is crap" meme that is pervasive in slashdot.
  • Replacements? Sure.... There's X2, X3, X4, X5, etc. Right now, we are up to the eleventh major version of X, and the sixth major release of that version.

    True, in 1984, the author of X knew that it was a start, but in 1991, Linus knew that the small kernel he had was a start, as well. We aren't using the same Linux as we were in 1991, and we aren't using the same X as we were in 1984.
  • The Unix Hater's Handbook is an amusing swipe at Unix culture, but it comes across as a 'real programmers' manifesto. If you dont know what I mean, read the Jargon File's entries on older operating systems. A kind of snobbery about older and less successful OS's pervades old time hacker lore. This is quite amusing, as Unix has become far more than it's contemparies ever hoped to, although at the time Unix compared poorly to the design goals of say Multics.

    This elitism extends to X. Of course X is hardware dependent to the extent that it requires some graphical capabilities of the systen it's running on, but it still does a damn good job of running on myriad different platforms. X is a great idea (the whole client-server principle reversed) and quote well implemented.

    It's just a damn shame that the open-endeness of it's design goals and implementation are exploited by luddites and f*ckwits as an excuse for a little trolling.


    Chris Wareham
  • I was thinking along the lines of replacing the whole bloated mess, not incremental revisions to it. Something like the Berlin project looks promising, but nowhere near completion...
  • The buzzing you're hearing is from the video card. There is tons of noise going on inside your computer video cards typically produce a good amount's worth. As the video card has to redraw the position of the mouse on the display, the extra work by the vid. card is picked up as radiation by the sound card and affects the output on the sound card. I'm no genius so I don't quite know how to explain it properly, but I do know that the video is the culprit.

    Most people with project studios seeking to get the most out of their sound cards while keeping a relatively low noise floor typically move the sound card and video card as physically far apart as they can. Usually the sound car is placed at the bottom of the machine and the vid. card near the power supply. I remember older modems I'd purchase making the same suggestion and I imagine it's for the same reason.

    Creative Labs [soundblaster.com] cards aren't very good at keeping their noise clean, that's why they're not considered much of a project card. Turtle Beach [tbeach.com] cards are pretty good at keeping their sound clean and you could get a montego for relatively cheap, a a new project studio version of the montego has come out for $349 that will do optical/analog S/PDIF digital output to your stereo (if you're really worried about noise and want a complete gaming experience) as well as support for quad speakers.
  • Any thoughts? I'd love to give it the old college try.

  • The Mac may look nice but up untill Mac OS X (oh wait OS X hasn't shipped yet just OS X Server) both pragramming and stabillity sucked! I speak from experiance. The mac uses a unified memory model - meaning any app can over write the OS or any other app.

    From a user persective Mac OS may be cool but from a coding persective it sucks! On the other hand some of the windows managers you just ripped on have very nice program ability.


    "There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
    "SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
  • Check this, W was created by merging two U's hence the term double U.
  • I've got one of those machines. They are very nice and small. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with the bios or something, and it doesn't boot (it starts humming, but that is about it). It had been left off for about a year, so it may have been something to do with battery backed up boot code or something.

    If anyone knows how to fix one of these things, I would like to know (I can't find any info on Sony's web site -- I think they have disowned the product line).
  • Hmm.. Now where do I get this Dreyers Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Ice cream here in Germany? :-D
  • Things grow to get better, If when you turned five, did your mom say YOU'VE LEARNED TOO MUCH, I think I'll kill you now...

    Just think about it ;)

    Don't bash it if it works...

    Windows on the other hand... ;)
  • As far as the display technology that OS X is using, my understanding is that it's something called Quartz, which is basically a bastardization of some DPS stuff mixed with some of Adobe's newer PDF technology. (This is my understanding of it, anyway.)

  • Journalists, read this... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No big deal, no long winded diatribe... Just this:

    The X Window System has been around since BEFORE Linux desktop environments like GNOME and KDE were created. BEFORE, *NOT* AFTER. Please get that right from now on. Linux has utilized this system since not long after it (Linux) was conceived.

    When I see one Linux desktop group or another (people who have been following the Linux desktop press know which one I'm singling out more) getting sole credit for giving Linux users an alternative to the command line interface, I get seriously peeved.

    Get your history straight, and please stop crediting the proliferation of Linux graphic systems incorrectly. The X Window System existed long before Linux was even an itch in Linus' crotch. GNOME and KDE run on TOP of X, and before GNOME and KDE there were plenty of other windowing systems that ran on TOP of X. This is nothing new...
  • I advocate the use of Linux and X as much as I can

    ok, please don't take this as a flame, it is not meant as a flame, but simply a question you maybe should think about. The question is:

    Why do you advocate the use of X when you don't know what it is?

    kind regards,
    Per
  • Not really. X is more just a networked graphical layer on the console. The actual GUI itself is created via your selection of window manager and applications (and by proxy, widget sets as well). X itself is pretty simple - I think the core wire protocol consists of like 5 or 6 messages. All X does is manage the actual drawing to the display device, and the user input.
  • Yes, I think we all know SCSI's an interface type (there ARE a lot of geeks around here, y'know). I personally don't like IDE - much too needy of host CPU time. Of course, it's not like I can really afford to go all SCSI on my home machine - that's the only reason I find IDE an acceptible substitute, because I can't afford better. :)
  • Pick up a non-commercial copy of VisualWorks from www.objectshare.com and join the cult.. :)

    SmallTalk *is* cool. And the guru's that program business systems with it still to this day get obscene salaries ($150k +)
  • Sounds cute, but when I need to do some halfway serious work over a slow connection, I just run emacs (the original text-oriented windowing system).

    Now if you thought of this "T" project as a method of running X windows from inside of emacs, you would have the immediate support from the emacs faithful. I suggest asking around on alt.religion.emacs.

  • I ran windows 95 on a DX2/80 with 4 meg once. It took TEN SECONDS to open the start menu. This is OK speed ?
  • It used to be at ftp.x.org, I think. About 6 years ago. I don't know what happened to it.
  • Don't even think about it!

    I'm presuming said chocolate is American, and Americans only tolerate their 'chocolate' because they've never tasted the proper stuff... Hershey? YUCK!!!

    But then of course, what with Belgian chocolate now apparently being poisoned....
  • X server and NT are two different paradigms.
    NT is a OS with all of its functionality included.
    X is a graphics server (not an OS). Thus NT may have more functionality than X but that point is irrelevant anyway. It is like saying my computer is more functional than my basket ball.
  • I love his comments..."this is a good start", "there are some deficiencies"...15 years later people are still patching this in X or that, and for code that was a "start" it's still kicking :)


    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • I agree somewhat. X should be replaced with a
    cleaner fresher approach. 15 years of addons make
    X a tad large and slow. The new replacement should be fully compatible with X but not bloat up the new system like Windows.
  • Actually w/ some cards (at least the 3dfx banshee) the controll registers get included too. So you see a minimum of 48megs of ram.

  • Y? (Score:1)

    by MikeO ( 951 )
    So, when do we start working on 'Y'?

    --
  • I get that once in awhile on my new PC, and quite a bit more often on the ol' 486. Both using MS windows, I been to lazy to touch Linux since I installed it *curse winmodem*.
    My sound card is a fairly good one too. :(
  • it also takes a whole bunch of processor, well it did on our PII300 and rendered a p200 almost unusable, compleetly hogging the whole procesor.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • Maybe he/she was once a windows user and changed
    over to an OS like linux with X and he/she found it to be an improvement. You don't need to be an
    expert to judge whether something is better or
    not. But it sure helps. :>

  • I know some companies are experimenting with very high resolution screens (like 300dpi versus the current 70-80 dpi). If these become reality, the pixel-dependancy of X won't seem like such a pedantic problem. (PostScript to the rescue?)


    --
  • I believe Win95 requires 8MB. You must be thinking of Win3.1 or OS/2.

    I ran X windows on a 486 running a 8MHZ! And it felt plenty zippy opening rxvt windows using the twm window manager. It was running at 8MHZ because I forgot to attach the "turbo" button. It was a bit sluggish with only 4MB but with 8 or 16MB it was fast.

    Oh, and X crashes a lot less than your average win95 setup. And it's Y2K compliant.
  • I think that it's interesting that X has been around for 15 years (although what's more is the W bit, I'll have to look into what that was). Obviously, a tremendous amount of development and tweaking has gone into it, and yet I have seen many people complain that it's slow, bloated, etc...I'm not a coder (but I hope to be...college freshman this fall, in fact), so I have no idea as to the validity of those statements.
    Another thing, to my knowledge, there isn't another mainstream OS/GUI that uses the X client/server model (or is there?) so I guess that there isn't much to compare it to, unless you consider Berlin, but it's not quite so complete as to be a valid comparison.

    Bleh, or I could just be blithering about nothing...but the moderators will deal with that, eh? *g*
  • Simple Question:

    Have you been under a rock for five years or something. There are much more than three apps
    that run under X today. Although truetype fonts
    would be nice.
  • abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvWXYz
    X is a successor of W so the successor of X will be called .........
    'nuff said

    not meant as a flame ... just an explanation
    --
  • It's pretty clear that the project has been scrapped. But I'd like to know why the author took the approach he did. There are so many problems with the design.

    Forced use of the highest colour depth prevents you from running a lower colour depth and using the unused video memory for pixmap caching.

    The connection notification feature of the Network Server could be exploited for DoS. Imagine 10K "Can this person connect to me?" windows appearing on your screen in a matter of seconds. The security hole in X is easily plugged (ever heard of a firewall?) anyway. If someone was really (insane) ambitious, they could patch in an xf86config option to enable/disable the network server in X.

  • W? (Score:1)

    by sig11 ( 10638 )
    Has anyone ever seen W, or do you have the source? I'd be interested in playing with it. I guess thats just me and my fetish with old computer stuff. ;)

    sig11
  • well, I can give you 3 of the 4. Imagine being able to gain compleete control of an NT workstation, mouse included, from any java capable web browser. I've just started using Remotely Anywhere for NT and it works extrememly well to do remote access for the things you described, although it is pretty far from an X window. I get stuck using NT for a few machines at work and have recently come to rely on Remotely Anywhere to do my off site work for the NT boxes, true I can do stuff by command line for some stuff in NT, but I already have a problem trying to use LS in a dos box (doesn't work, I almost set up ls.bat in the windows directory, I'm sure you can figure out what it's function would be) and I'd hate to complicate things between the 2 any more than I already end up doing.

    Anyway, I'm definatly not saying that this can replace X in any way, but I just went to step up to the challenge, 3 out of 4 ain't bad is it?

    matguy
    Net. Admin.

  • Re:Y? (Score:4)

    by mill ( 1634 ) on Saturday June 19, 1999 @05:01AM (#1842716)
    http://www.hungry.com/products/Ywindows/

    /mill
  • how big a tape did you have to have ?

    ah well
    a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
  • This last week I've installed Linux on a computer in our lab, and thanks to the X server on my NT box I can now live a decent life. It not only looks really cool to have the gnome panel there in the corner, but it works perfectly and is fast. I've seen windows apps display on remote NT boxes, and I can tell you that's not nice.

    About the MS Windows window manager: you can replace it, and there are several alternatives. Unfortunately, the title bars and dragging of windows is somehow provided by the application process, and I'm not sure much can be changed about that (unless MS goes Open Source).
  • "Windows doesn't have this distinction between mechanism and policy, so if I decide that I don't like the way the title-bar buttons work, I'm SOL:" I happen to be one of the lowly dual-booters, the people who can't decide between micros~1 and linux. I decided a long time ago that I didn't like the way the windows GUI behaved, and I changed it. It's fast coming to the point where you don't have to be imprisoned by the taskbar to get work done. This [geocities.com] is a prime example.

  • Comparing X and Windows (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...is like comparing apples and oranges. Windows
    is an entire operating system, X is only a windowing and display system.

    One can argue that X does carry around a fair ammount of baggage, but at the same time, one of it's design goals was to be as portable as possible, and with that usually comes some extra baggage. X itself is not that large, a lot of the 'bloat' comes from all the libraries that now are standard to find with an installation. So along those lines, you could make the argument that X as a usual install is getting big, but so be it. Find something that can do everything that it can (before someone says it, no, Photon can not) that's smaller.
  • > Some days, it looks like slashdot is nothing more than a warm, fuzzy feeling, for losers who have nothing to SAY.

    Nice of you to join us.

  • "...I'm running Enlightenment and Gnome, but it still ..."

    I think we see the problem here...

  • Irix (Score:1)

    by ksheff ( 2406 )

    I believe with since Irix 4, SGI has used X as it's windowing system. I think they used NeWS before then. The last time I used an SGI workstation (1995), I enjoyed it very much. It had a desktop environment, which I rarely used. They used Motif, but with a special X resource variable set, it could use SGI's chrome which would make Motif actually look good. Actually, given a choice between a SGI workstation and a Linux machine, I'd probably take the SGI machine for the OpenGL support, ImageVision, and the other neat features they threw in.

  • Here! Here!

    The whole oracle/java NC (network computer) thing
    kinda boggled me cuz X does everything that NCs
    would do. I bet a lot of engineers at NEC and other xterm makers felt silly designing NCs after
    years of building xterms.
  • Win95 will run in only 4 mb, but you don't get any networking features with that footprint.
  • I have the same problem-- moving my PS/2 mouse causes a buzzing noise. It could well be a problem with my hardware setup, but I've noticed it with several cards.

    First Setup-- el-cheapo OPL-3SAX card (I think) with a Trident 975 graphics card.

    Second: Creative Labs AudioPCI (ES1371) with Trident 975

    Current Setup: ES1371 sound card with i740 graphics card

    The CDROM drive does seem to produce a lot of noise, though. It's an ACER 32x model. This model seems to have a really shitty D/A converter-- s/n is ~75 dB. The noise comes in on the CD channel.
  • I think the key item here is the "SX". Windows almost never uses the FPU, but as I understand it, X does quite a bit (especially for fonts, in my experience).

    As for the RAM, I totally agree. Back when I got into linux, I readily shelled out the $300 to go from 8 to 16 MB RAM (man, does it hurt to think about that now!) for significant improvements in performance on a 486SX.

    On the other hand, I don't know how well Win 95 holds up under low RAM either. While the box I described above dual booted into Win3.1 (which ran fine with 8 MB), a 486SX laptop I have and still use dual boots into Win95. I found that machine pretty useless with 8 MB RAM with Win95 (actually trashed the HD from all the swapping). I run it now at 20 MB (its max). X performance really depends a lot on the WM and the extent to which you have to emulate the FPU.

  • Meco (Score:1)

    by ksheff ( 2406 )

    The NeXT cubes were only about $200. I think there is a project to get Linux to run on these type machines too.

    The intel Paragon supercomputers and encrypting ethernet equipment were cool also. Too bad I don't have the money or space. =(

  • VNC is cool as well; it's cross platform and open source.

    http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

    Cheers
    Alastair
  • 1) TrueType fonts may be used. You need a (free) program named xfttf (I think, or xfsttf maybe, I've forgotten). It runs as an X font server. 2) The "disadvantages" (except cut-n-paste) of X, according to that text, is, what I think, its advantages. The lack of a built-in window management is good. To allow externa font-servers is good. The only bad with X is the clipboard. I like the mouse-bindings for copy/paste, but I sure do not like to only be able to copy and paste text. I really hope someone will hack a generic clipboard-functionallity. And not only in GTK or Qt! A _generic_ on! But I may be just dreaming...
  • that's why a new berlin widget set had to be coded,i don't think there's a lot of widget set who are corba compliant.
  • win95 will "run" in 4 mb in a restricted mode, not quite safe mode, but almost as bad. I only know because I took out the memory card on my old Toshiba T1900c and started up the computer, it has 4 on board and lo and behold, windows did start up, not happily, but it did start up. I used it for a couple of years through college and now it sits in the corner running Personal Web Server (and getting restarted before the 47 days run out.) I do have to say though, for a win95 install it was extremely stable as I can't recall much of any problems that I would blame the os for, but it sure wasn't zippy. As I recall it took some 3-5 minutes to start up (depending on if it had to log into the network if the net card was in,) I'm sure it takes much less time to get linux and then X up on something like this. Well anyway, I guess there's always room for argument in the computer world, I would fear the alternative.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.

  • Re:Y? (Score:1)

    by thsths ( 31372 )
    > So, when do we start working on 'Y'?

    i don't think that is likely. actually, X version number seems to converge against some fixed number, similar to TeX.

    how this?

    well, they started with W, then X. a lot of things
    happend, we had X10 and finally X11. then X11R6, and now X11R6.4. i'm not saying that there won't be an X11R7, but there will unlikely be an X12.

    because compatibility is important. every X11 app (even R2 or something) should be able to connect to a recent X11 server. version numbering has more to do with compatibility than with progress. and you basically can't break compatibility (even berlin has an Xserver...), there won't be W.

    talk about design decissions...
  • I can see Both sides, and just posted something to get more discussion going. X maybe bloated, but I still like it... I bash Windows because I don't like Microsoft in general witht he whole "We're better than everyone" approach... But that's a different story ;)
    Anyone experimented with something that you thought was better than X? If so lemie know :)
  • I should check that out, Remotely anywhere is some $100, free is much better.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • Wasn't that the aim of Desqview/X ? Or was that entirely different? What was the deal with desq/kview anyway? I've always heard it was excellent, way better than Win16 while running the same apps but never got to see it except once when glancing at a really old Byte magazine.

    Also, I've recently picked up a copy of Digital Pathworks 32 which was going at auction. Nobody would bid at 40. Nobody at 20. Not 10, not five. Some guy offered 2, I immediately raised it to 4 and it was all mine. All mine I tell you! MWUHAHAHahahahah. Anyway, that runs unix applications on Win32 across a network. I'm not sure what else it does or whether it will actually be useful because it's swotvac and I haven't yet had a proper chance to play with it yet.
  • Actually, if I remember correctly, the ONC RPC library was made available in source form before XView was (just the RPC library, not NFS server or client code), so it wasn't Sun's first opened source.
  • I read something on that. It said that the UDMA/66 didn't run at full speed very often.. It wasn't much of an improvement over regular ATA IDE (20 MBPS). And it boggs down the processor some... We've got UDMA/33 on most new machines. That actually runs at 33 MBPS. UW SCSI II runs over 80 MBPS. If you see something saying we're faster then SCSI, this is only true of older SCSI [SCSI I, SCSI II (not ultra wide)].

  • Old code is like a classic car, its simple and elegant. Its often has a perfect non-bloated structure for hot rod conversions. It is simple to understand and parts are easy to drop into other projects. Unlike hot rod conversions, rebuilding old code does not scrape the knuckles, or cost money for parts or licensing fees. When compiled, its often very fast and the eye candy at large gatherings of computer enthusiasts. Many people collect old code, keep it in its pristine state or fix it up. Sometimes it is hard to see in a world of hype and marketing, but will always be in style.

    But one thing is for sure: old code will never die. There are always people who swear the best old code is GNU, but just has been reborn!
  • I used to be a SCSI True Believer. I had an all-SCSI PC for years. Now, however, for my workstations I use UDMA IDE HDDs. The CPU usage has been reduced quite a bit from the old days of IDE, and the bang for the buck is just too good to go with SCSI for non-server machines.

    That said, I'd love to see on-board SCSI MBs drop in price, and SCSI HDDs, too, to compete with IDE more effectively. I just don't see that happening any time soon.

    --
    Get your fresh, hot kernels right here [kernel.org]!

  • Well, it all started with Xerox's GUI, which was called Star.
  • Hints: browse to www.altavista.com and try these keywords "ivan sutherland" "xerox parc" cheers, gbs
  • Those disk packs could be RL01 & RL02's they are 5 and 10 mb each
  • DesqView/X was a GREAT product, we used it, plus the development kit to develop X Apps without having to purchase a Sun system, or a very expensive SCO License. When we finally did get a Sun System the port was quick and relatively painless. (The only issues involved where related to 8.3 naming problems which caused duplicates in the Motif Header files).

    It definately performed better than Win95 does today with native apps, and Win 3.1 ran well in it also. I will never figure out how it didn't kick some royal butt, but the same can be said for OS/2.

    Ah, the damage MS has done is immeasurable. Imagine where we could be today, stable apps with more features that we WANT, instead of what Bill thinks we want.


    -- Keith Moore
  • You do realize that this is purely opinion, don't you? I like X better for its flexibility. A good program is like a good tool--using Windows or the Mac for GUI development is like giving an artist a choice between crayons or colored pencils. X lets you use anything--charcoal, oil paints, whatever--if you can figure it out...

    I can't stand MacOS or NeXT's idea of either Style or cApItAlIzAtIOn... Maybe Steve Jobs wants to be 31337. As for Style, what does Style (with a capital S) mean? There's no universal concept of Style. There's your concept, and there's Steve Jobs' concept, and they don't mesh with *my* concept. So offer some facts instead of opinions.

    For my part, I've seen GUIs and Apps under X that resemble Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc, etc. So where's your Style now?
  • on the last part of that I can argue that point as I imagine it is taken out of context. It probably referrs to reliability rather than speed. For something small, say a name server for a small group of web servers, which needs to be pretty damned solid (it does no good to have a web server running if it can't be found as I have learned a few times the hard way) I could understand forgoing speed for stability. I don't think I would go so far as to run a 386, but a low end 486 does a whole lot in the server arena and from my experience the are often more stable than most PII's, be it actually more stable or just not as affected by heat, if I don't have to deal with it I see it as being more stable.

    For the real argument though, SCSI speed isn't the only factor to the argument, again stability is the key there. Anyone that has run with both will usually tell you that the error rate on a scsi drive is much less than ide, for a couple of reasons.

    First, since like what was talked above, the processor handles much more of the i/o of ide than scsi. With this in mind you must remember that processors constantly make mistakes that are cought by the os and resolved before probelms arise (some os's do this better than others, hint hint) so when an ide job is being handled by the processor and an error occurs that is not cought by the os then this error is passed on to the drive. The more that is being handled by the processor the more errors can be passed along to it.

    Second, current ide standard is udma, which is at the edge of what is capable through the aging hardware specification. This in mind, would you want to rely on an old technology pushed to it's limit. no.

    Third, multiple drives, most good servers don't have one hard drive and one cd rom and call it good. Most will have a dedicated boot and system drive, another drive for data (be it web, ftp, or local file service,) add to that some type of backup drive and the defacto cd rom and you've filled up some ide ports, not to mention that you have 2 on each port running master and slave, which I don't care what anyone tells you it does pose problems besides speed.

    So there you go, 3 real good reasons not to go for IDE, without going into speed issues. That is if you can affford it.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • and, according to ST TOS, we will still be using them in the 24th century.
  • Laugh all you like, but Apple made many meaningful contributions to GUI development. I'm not sure of the precise timing, but the basic components of GUIs were all invented before the creation of Xerox PARC in 1970. I posted this to /. some time back. Look up Vannevar Bush, Ivan Sutherland, Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart, Jeff Raskin. However, Apple added very meaningfully to these concepts with innovations such as direct manipulation, the menu bar, and region-based drawing. Apple was also the first to price it under $10,000. Just because Apple did use ideas from earlier works doesn't mean Windows isn't a Mac rip-off.
  • ..shameless plug..

    Don't forget about Citrix's Winframe / Metaframe products, that allow you to use a somewhat X-like client/server model with MS Windows apps. (Although the definitions of client/server are a bit different than what is generally used in the X world, the concept is the same.)

    -Tom
  • EOF.
    --
    - Sean
  • The fact that it doesn't happen in Windows is a little puzzling. Perhaps the gain is turned down more in Windows? It could also be the driver. The driver can actually make a difference in the amount of interference you get.

    It most certainly can. Some instructions generate a lot of RFI, for example, multiplies and divides... because these instructions generate activity on a vast expanses of chip real-estate that normally like dormant. Not only do they generated RFI, but heat as well, which you'll notice if you're running a laptop (the fan speeds up.)
  • I've spent most of the last ten years squeezing performance out of X programs, and I'm here to tell you that having network transparency as a goal was X's single biggest design flaw.

    Go sit down in front of a Windows box and scroll a page of text. Pretty mind-blowing how fast it is, isn't it? You know why? Because the underlying implementation has access to a frame buffer! It doesn't have to squirt all its bits through a straw, hitting at least three processes along the way, and all the blocking and context-switching that that brings with it.

    Sure, X has optional ways to sometimes get at the frame buffer, and on some systems in some circumstsances, they even work. After you've written your program's rendering engine twice, once for each method.

    X's second biggest design flaw is it's lack of user interface policy. ``There's more than one way to do it'' and they're all different and most of them suck. Most Linux fanboys come from the ``real programmer'' school and hold customizability as the holy grail -- it doesn't matter if the system is completely unusable out of the box, because they see that as an opportunity to tweak the hell out of it for their own use. And maybe some of them will even come up with something usable. For themselves.

    Well I'm here to tell you that customizability is a cop-out. ``I'll make it an option'' is almost always another way of saying ``I didn't design it right in the first place, so I'll force the end user to finish designing the program for me.''

    Perhaps there are some people who hate Unix and X out of kurmudgeonly spite, but I'm not one of them. I hate them because I've got the scars, and I know where the bodies are buried.

    Now this is where someone chimes in, ``well if you hate X and Unix so much, what's better?'' That's the wrong question. Just because B is worse than A doesn't mean that A doesn't suck, and isn't fully worthy of the criticism it receives.

  • So organziations cludged their way through psuedo-OOP GUIs like X/Xt/Motif and SunView.

    There is nothing ``pseudo'' about the object-orientedness of Xt and the toolkits built on top of it (Motif and Athena.) The object system they use includes method inheritance (single-inheritance only), runtime typing, and the usual bag of goodies. It's primitive, but it is every bit as object-oriented as anything else that claims that name.

    You are right that there is nothing object-oriented about X -- because X is an on-the-wire protocol, and so low level that hardly anybody programs in it directly anyway. That's what toolkits are for.

    I suspect that you are laboring under the misapprehension that for something to be ``object oriented'' a so-called ``object-oriented language'' has to be involved. There is no such thing as an ``object-oriented language.'' OO is a programming style, not a syntax. There are some languages that provide useful tools that make an OO style easier to use (like Java, CLOS, and Smalltalk) and there are some languages that provide a huge set of broken and useless tools that get in your way and screw you if you try to use any of them (like C++). But you can write object-oriented code in any language, and you can write assembler in any language too.

    GUIs are natural application for OOPs with their hierachical data structures, dynamic memory usage, etc.

    This is true. Which is why that's how Xt and Motif and Athena are written, and how one programs in them.

    Motif and Athena both suck in their own ways, but the problems have nothing to do with whether they are object-oriented or not. Motif's problems are that it's huge, overly complicated, and insanely buggy. Athena's problems are that it is missing important features, and it has an insanely ugly and hostile look-and-feel. (And both of them use Xrm, the X Resource Manager, which is a completely separate disaster.)

    But both (all three) of these toolkits are most assuredly object-oriented. Which just goes to show that being object-oriented doesn't make everything wonderful, like some people seem to assume.

  • Eh? Pathworks 32 (I'm assuming client) is the bundled eXcursion PC X Server, DECNet over IP, and maybe the DECnet mail client. There's some DOS stuff in there...batches that get run at startup that can be managed remotely from a Pathworks server on a VMS system. If it is a new enough version I think there's a good terminal emulator in there too. It definitely doesn't 'run unix applications on Win32'.

    Pathworks server is really pretty nice...think Samba with a decent management interface, since that is essentially what it is...SMB (well, LanMan) protocol file and print services from VMS. Combined with cluster aliases and a VMS cluster, you've got pretty bulletproof file services. Lizzy Borden could take an axe and sink it deep into your Vax, and the rest of the cluster would keep your users from ever knowing. :-)

    You definitely got your $4 worth though, considering how expensive PC X servers are.

    I'm not sure what ever happened with DesqView/X. It was a remarkebly good product...I don't recall what transport it used but it definitely wasn't IP. I recall using it over a 2MB LANtastic network. Of course, the Desqview layers were beneath that too...it was supposed to be able to find spare CPU cycles on other machines on your network and would selectively run applications on
    those other machines. Sounded cool, but I never had a chance to test it.

    --Rubinstien
  • Ok, preamble/disclaimer: I'm not an entirely disinterested party here, so if any moderator out there feels this is inappropriate, feel free to moderate it down into oblivion.

    But. I work for a company called Attachmate; we write (among other things) an X Window server for MS-Windows (called Extra! X). One of the features our particular server offers, is for the user to specify their own (unix/X) window manager. This means that if you don't like the Windows wm (which provides the title bar, window frame and so on), you can specify your own (presumably residing on the same host as the client apps you want to run), which can be any wm you choose (WMaker, fvwm2, kwm, Enlightenment, IceWM and so on...).

    Now, even though it may sound like it, I'm not plugging our particular product, as such. The reason being that we gear towards corporate users, and so include many features that most people probably have no need for. The product tends to be pricey (I don't have exact figures, but it's up in the 100's of dollars US per seat).

    We are also firmly closed source. (I hang my head in shame :-)

    However, what I am getting at is that there is a wide variety of X servers for MS-Windows out there. If you are happy with yours, fine. But if the ability to select a different wm from the one supplied by MS-Windows is something that interests you, then you may want to check out some of the others, many of which are probably less pricey than the one I mentioned, or may even be free (beer/speech). And they may have that capability (of choosing your own window manager).

    I'm afraid I can't really recommend any, since the only ones I know well are in the same market as ours, and so operate in much the same price range. If you're really interested, companies such as Persoft and Hummingbird, to name a few, also make high-end "enterprise-level" X servers for Windows.

    Anyway... just some food for thought, more than anything else.
    --
    - Sean

  • Software dithering is really nice, if it can be gotten to work well, like it does on MacOS. People used to do desktop publishing on 256-color monitors and the like, because the Mac could pallette shift so well. It also allows you to drag windows between monitors of different color depths, etc.

    I don't know enough about X to say, but is a rewrite (like Y) necessary, or can X be fixed?
    --

  • While it's true that Linux/BSD has done more to popularize the use of X in PC space than anything else, X clients (if I have the terminology right) have been around on Windows, MacOS, and OS/2 (and maybe even DOS) for a long time. They were fairly widely used until Windows started getting more client-server stuff (like oDBC) built into it.
    --

  • The Second Announcement (Score:4)

    by Jamie Zawinski ( 775 ) <jwz@jwz.org> on Saturday June 19, 1999 @10:44AM (#1842792) Homepage


    Well, someone had to post this. I first saw this message in, I think, 1987. I don't know where it originated.

    • OFFICIAL NOTICE - POST IMMEDIATELY

      • X


      DANGEROUS VIRUS

    First, a little history. The X window system escaped from Project Athena at MIT where it was being held in isolation. When notified, MIT stated publicly that "MIT assumes no responsibility....". This is a very disturbing statement. It then infiltrated Digital Equipment Corporation, where it has since corrupted the technical judgement of this organization.

    After sabotaging Digital Equipment Corporation, a sinister X consortium was created to find a way to use X as part of a plan to dominate and control interactive window systems. X windows is sometimes distributed by this secret consortium free of charge to unsuspecting victims. The destructive cost of X can not even be guessed.

    X is truly obese - whether it's mutilating your hard disk or actively infesting your system, you can be sure its up to no good. Innocent users need to be protected from this dangerous virus. Even as you read this, the X source distribution and the executable environment created is being maintained on hundreds of computers - maybe even your own.

    Digital Equipment Corporation is already shipping machines that carry this dreaded infestation. It must be destroyed.

    This is what happens when software with good intentions goes bad. It victimizes innocent users by distorting their perception of what is and what is not good software. This malignant window system must be destroyed.

    Ultimately DEC and MIT must be held accountable for this heinous _software crime_, brought to justice, and made to pay for a _software cleanup_. Until DEC and MIT answer to these charges, they both should be assumed to be protecting dangerous software criminals.

    DON'T BE FOOLED!! JUST SAY NO TO X.


    X windows. A mistake carried out to perfection. X windows. Dissatisfaction guaranteed. X windows. Don't get frustrated without it. X windows. Even your dog won't like it. X windows. Flakey and built to stay that way. X windows. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. X windows. Flawed beyond belief. X windows. Form follows malfunction. X windows. Garbage at your fingertips. X windows. Ignorance is our most important reesource. X windows. It could be worse, but it'll take time. X windows. It could happen to you. X windows. Japan's secret weapon. X windows. Let it get in YOUR way. X windows. Live the nightmare. X windows. More than enough rope. X windows. Never had it. Never will. X windows. No hardware is safe. X windows. Power tools for Power Fools. X windows. Power tools for power losers. X windows. Putting new limits on productivity. Simplicity made complex. X windows. The Cutting Edge of Obsolescence. X windows. The art of incompetence. X windows. The defacto substandard. X windows. The first fully modular software disaster. X windows. The joke that kills. X windows. The problem for your problem. X windows. There's got to be a better way. X windows. Warn your friends about it. X windows. You'd better sit down. X windows. You'll envy the dead.

  • Buzzing noise from your mouse into your speakers? You most likely have one of the unused mixer inputs turned up by default. Fire up xmixer and turn down what you are not using, like mic, aux, etc...

  • It's true that X has a number of very nice features not found elsewhere, but I think the orignal poster was expressing the feeling that "If I don't need it, and I can't get rid of it, it's bloat". This is a core tenant of the Linux philosophy, but it goes out the 'window' as far as X is concerned.

    It would be nice to have a display manager that was designed for single user, non-networked workstations. But, 15 years is a long time.
    --
  • Good idea, except that NeXT, with it's display postscript, never really got much traction in the desktop publishing industry.

    As far as I can tell, Display PostScript (on the Next) does virtually everything X does, and it prints 1:1. Too bad it was never more widely/cheaply licenced.
    --
  • Does anyone have any idea why my moving my PS2 mouse under linux would make a low (but noticable) buzzing sound on my speakers?

    Kinda like a zipper sound? Usually a "dirty" graphics card. If you get out of X, make sure you unload gpm (so moving your mouse causes no change on your display), and then move your mouse, you should have no extra noises. If you get no zipping noises, it's likely to be the graphics card putting out tons of noise and your audio card not being sufficiently shielded.

    The fact that it doesn't happen in Windows is a little puzzling. Perhaps the gain is turned down more in Windows? It could also be the driver. The driver can actually make a difference in the amount of interference you get.

    How to fix it? If you think about it, there's quite a lot of RF and EM noise going on inside your computer and there's not a whole lot you can do but turn down the volume. As an extreme solution, you might consider looking up one of those projects to "wrap" your card in a kind of tinfoil shield. It's around the web somewhere. Of course, if you're that serious about clean recording you'll probably want to get a soundcard with digital I/O and a DAT to record on. Good luck.

  • Re:Conflicting information... (Score:3)

    by Chris Hanson ( 1683 ) on Saturday June 19, 1999 @12:28PM (#1842831) Homepage

    There were other mainstream platforms that used a client-server window system. To name a few, in chronological order:

    • Carnegie Mellon University's Andrew "wm" system, by Gosling (among others) and described in some detail in "Programming as if People Mattered" by Nathaniel Borenestein
    • Sun's NeWS, based on an object-oriented PostScript system and developed by Gosling (among others, again)
    • NEXTSTEP's Display PostScript system

    I'm sure my list is not complete. I bet Sun's SunView system (which NeWS replaced) was also client-server, for example, and I bet whatever Apollo used prior to X was also client-server (since DomainOS was actually a network operating system).

    Also, Mac OS X Server uses Display PostScript right now. Mac OS X uses "Quartz", a display system that has an imaging model affine-equivalent with Display PostScript's but isn't currently implemented in a client-server fashion.

    (Though it's been a stated goal that it should be easy to make it client-server, either by third parties or in subsequent releases by Apple. My bet is that Apple will do it themselves in v2.0 or something, since it's something a bunch of their engineers will probably want...)

  • Sun currently ships with CDE, the Common Desktop Environment, which is based on Motif and the Motif widget set. I find it quite clunky and cumbersome -- FVWM has it licked on most counts. SGI's Irix is similarly based on a Motif-like system though with some nice chrome. I believe the display mechanisms are different though (is Irix X based?).

    The only really outstanding commercial Unix desktop predating Linux that I'm aware of is NeXT, and I'm currently running the highly NeXT-influenced WindowMaker. Note that I didn't run NeXT, I just find wm quite the bomb.

    Sun previously shipped with OpenLook / OpenWindows (also X based) and NeWS (Network Extensible Windowing System). Hewlett Packard had it's VUE (Visual User Environment) which highly influenced CDE. There's more general history here [sgi.com].

    Frankly, though, I have to agree with the general assessment that there was no really good integrated graphical environment for Unix prior to Linux and the FSF. For all the comparisons made between Linux and consumer desktops, you'll note that there are none made between GNOME/KDE and commercial Unix offerings, or to Windows 3.x. The development path for a best-of-breed desktop for Linux, bar none, is clearly established.

  • Well (he said, not trying to sound too much like a curmudgeon), it was a different world back then. Tape was about as good as it got for moving data around.

    I remember using the VAXstation 100 (aka VS100) mentioned in the announcement. Of course, I was using it in corporate America, so we didn't have X on it -- it had UIS, which was DEC's GUI prior to the X-based DECwindows.

    It's a tribute to these folks that X is still chugging along after all these years...
  • David Every explains Quartz here on MacKiDo. [mackido.com]

    I guess you could call anything based on more than two standards (DPS and PDF) 'bastardization,' but if it works, that's what matters.

    J.

  • Hi, Jamie.

    This is also in the Unix Hater's Handbook [catalog.com], referenced from your site [jwz.org], of course.

    One of the quips on X sheds some light though "How to make a 50 Mips workstation run like a 4.77 MHz IBM PC". Courtesy of Mr. Moore, consumer desktop PCs are shipping with 10 times the CPU speed and memory of a what was once a top-of-the-line workstation. When you add network bandwidth to the equation -- X was (and is) used to run many apps remotely on a server or other workstation to the local display -- X was a pig.

    The world's changed a lot. Most of the complaints against X have been repaired either by fixing the original problem, or more often, by upgrading the environment.

  • actually its a lot kewler with proper formatting in postscript. it just sounds like a rant with text formatting. recommend looking at the original...its on the web somewhere.
  • A couple of years ago, I came up with the idea of "T", both for "text" and coming *before* W (hmm, why did I know about W then???)

    I think it came after using a program whose name I forget that let me have 7 vt100 windows on a mac over a regular dial-up line.

    The basic idea was to have a T-window rather than X-window, and to not transmit as much of X as possible, allowing use over slow lines (I was still using a 2400 modem. Come to think of it, every few months I still do :). Essentially, allow the X applications and mouse interface, but translate (and cache) icons to text, and limit positioning to character rather than pixel position.

    Lacking the time & knolwedge, nothing ever happened with it :)

    While I'm at it, Lyx 1.2 (or 2.0, whatever it ends up) will be toolkit independent (currently it's locked to xforms, and klyx with qt uses .12 instead of 1.0, and is grossly out of date). One of the planned toolkits is ncurses, meaning a text interface (of course, equations won't fully display, but it will allow work when only text is available).

    Gratuitious plug: If you're interested in such things, see www.lyx.org, and peek into the "Devlopers only" area (we need a better name :). Currently, most of the developers are tied up with the (purportedly) final release of 1.0.x, and little if any work is occurring on 1.1. But more coders, and particularly documenters, are welcome.
    There will not be individual ports to particular tookits, but a toolkit-free core, glue/wrappers/whatevers (not my area).

    Mmm, and if anyone wants to take over the mail-merge portion, I'd be happy to pass it on :)

    hawk
  • I don't know the exact year, but I presume it was by June 86, because I was still at my parents' home.

    One of my cousins who worked at HP came by a family gathering with one of their latest & greatest--a "portable" running unix--and apparently X. Plasma display (i think), wall-power, and a 68k processor. At the time, something drawing a space-shuttle by wire frame on your kitchen table was quite impressive . . .

  • My mom worked as the Wire Chief for a large railroad back in the 80's. Her "office" was filled with those big DEC mainframes with the disk-packs that screwed onto the top (bonus question: anyone know how much those things stored?).

    Anyway, some time around '82 or so, she brought me to her office to see their new Xerox computers. Her terminal had a big (19"?) greyscale monitor with a full WIMP system. I didn't know much about GUIs at the time, since I didn't get my first Amiga until '85, but I remember that you had could drag icons around using the big, optical mouse, and that it had a really horrible word processor that was a pain in the butt but WYSIWYG nonetheless.

    Does anyone know what kind of system that was? I'm sure it was one of the higher-end models, since said railroad spent a lot of money on computer networking systems.

    On a side note, it's amusing that my dear ol' mom who can't program her menued VCR still knows more than I do about network upkeep: "What kind of encoding do your T-1's use these days?". She was the first woman Wire Chief in the history of that railroad. Mom, if you're reading this - you're cool.

  • Well, depends which way you look at it :
    - if you do real work, X-Windows is cool because of its client/server achitecture that allows you to run your program on a distant machine and see the results on your
    - if you do everything else (games/web/multimedia) it's a bloated piece of junk : it is very slow and inefficient at handling video cards for fast operations. It was made at a time when powerfull graphic chipset was almost sci-fi, so anything like accelerated 3D, accelerated video, etc... is not there. People try to correct that but it just adds more bloat...
  • RK05 - 2.5MB, with double density 5MB
    RL02 - 5MB, with double density 10MB

    Talk about an electron consumer...
  • The design of the X Window system is a client/server one such that a program can run on one computer and display on another. X provides a library called Xlib that lets a programmer open windows and draw in them. X is responsible for rendering the graphics on the hardware so it contains all the device specific stuff. Widgets sets like GTK extend Xlib by providing high level calls to make user interface objects and, so, they run on top of Xlib.

    Berlin is like X in that programs can run on one machine and display on another, but it intends to embed logic for user interface objects into the server to decrease network traffic. It also uses CORBA instead of sockets.

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