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X Window System Turns 30 Years Old
An anonymous reader writes "One of the oldest pieces of the Linux desktop stack still widely in use today is the X Window System that today is commonly referred to as X11 or in recent years the X.Org Server. The X Window System predates the Linux kernel, the Free Software Foundation, GCC, and other key pieces of the Linux infrastructure — or most software widely-used in general. Today marks 30 years since the announcement of X at MIT when it was introduced to Project Athena." X wasn't new when I first saw it, on Sun workstations the summer before I started college. When did you first encounter it?
30 is ancient in computer years, the X system is too old for the new generation of developers. I recommend we replace it with a far more superior one written in Javascript and Rails. With AGILE development methods we can have a better system up in a week.
We spent an inordinate amount of time and effort explaining (often to people with considerable software experience) why "client" and "server" were the wrong way round.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The best way to explain it, that I've found, is this:
A server lets clients access a shared resource. On a file server, it's storage. On a web server, it's documents. On a compute server, it's processing. On an X server, the shared resource is the display, and clients are given access to it.