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From: jg@crl.dec.com (Jim Gettys)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Why do so many "great" people dislike X?
Message-ID: <1990Sep4.203701.18657@crl.dec.com>
Date: 4 Sep 90 20:37:01 GMT
References: <9009041354.AA03267@armory>  <1990Sep4.202433.19653@wrl.dec.com>
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Reply-To: jg@crl.dec.com (Jim Gettys)
Organization: DEC Cambridge Research Lab
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And the third (Dennis Richie) watched AT+T take so long with the BLIT
that the great advance over the state of the art elsewhere it represented
was lost, and never went anywhere.  Sigh...  To give you an idea of where
things were, the BLIT was roughly equivalent to an X terminal in many respects
(but not in others, as it did not provide network transparent access to 
applications on other machines) and was working several years before we
started 
working on X.

Of course, some of us believe that at today's and tomorrow's screen resolutions
every pixel is critical.  PostScript does great at 300 DPI; unfortunately,
most screens are between 75 DPI and 100 DPI.  I'd love it had screens been
high enough resolution to take that point of view, but reality is somewhat
otherwise, unfortunately.  And bandwidth (more or less directly related to
cost) goes as the square of the resolution.  PostScript by itself is 
insufficient for many imaging and CAD applications on even the fastest
of today's
hardware, something I (who used to get paid to write image processing software)
am quite sensitive to.
				- Jim