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From: mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Why do so many "great" people dislike X?
Message-ID: <9009040108.AA21988@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 4 Sep 90 01:08:39 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 67

> Bill Joy
> Dennis Ritchie
> Steven Jobs

> some of the people I respect the best in the whole wide world; all
> think X is brain-dead.  Do you have any ideas on why?

Yes and no.  I don't know why they think what they think, no.  But I
agree, X has problems.  It's just that I've not seen anything better.
To paraphrase who was it, Churchill I think, X is the worst window
system in the world, except for all the others.

> Did the wide acceptance of X have a lot to do with the urgent need to
> kill NeWS quickly on the part of DEC/HP/IBM (basically, did X rise to
> prominence for political rather than technical reasons)?

I don't know.  I like to think that in large part it was due to its
being freely available to all; that's certainly a big reason we're
using it here.

> Who're the people who did X anyway?  I never heard any names apart
> from the keyword 'MIT'.

From the LABEL file on the R4 tape,

         X Window System, Version 11
                  Release 4

            contents copyrighted by

     Massachusetts Institute of Technology
	      Adobe Systems, Inc.
	     Apollo Computer Inc.
	     Apple Computer, Inc.
		  AT&T, Inc.
		  Don Bennett
	       Bigelow & Holmes
		Bitstream, Inc.
		 Adam de Boor
		Cognition Corp.
	 Digital Equipment Corporation
    Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation
		   Franz Inc
	    Hewlett-Packard Company
		IBM Corporation
	Network Computing Devices, Inc.
	 O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.
		Dale Schumacher
		Marvin Solomon
		  Sony Corp.
		      SRI
	    Sun Microsystems, Inc.
		Tektronix, Inc.
	Texas Instruments Incorporated
		UniSoft Systems
  The Regents of the University of California
	    University of Wisconsin
		  Larry Wall
	     Wyse Technology, Inc.

The LABEL.CONTRIB file is much longer and I won't bother including the
whole thing here, but it's as widely varied....

					der Mouse

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