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From: gjc@mitech.com
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Why do so many "great" people dislike X?
Message-ID: <4874@mitech.com>
Date: 5 Sep 90 16:36:51 GMT
References: <9009041354.AA03267@armory>  <1990Sep4.202433.19653@wrl.dec.com> <1990Sep4.203701.18657@crl.dec.com>
Organization: Mitech Corporation, Concord MA
Lines: 24

In article <1990Sep4.203701.18657@crl.dec.com>, jg@crl.dec.com (Jim Gettys) writes:
> ...  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.

Was that before or after the availability of the BBN BITGRAPH? I had a BBN
bitgraph at the MIT AI LAB around 1982, and was working on a LISP interface
(from VAX-NIL). At the time LISP people at MIT were generally convinced that
a graphics/window environment HAD to be in a VIRTUAL-MEMORY-MAPPED graphics
buffer (like the Lispmachine). Some other LCS VAX hold-outs were putting their
money/time into the VS-100 unibus/fiber-optic thing, but I figured that
at 19.2KB using clever encodings a serial-line graphics terminal could
do quite well keeping up with anything a VAX-750 could possibly throw at it.

Quite possibly the BBN BITGRAPH was more primitive than the BLIT in its
base software. The thing did support downloadable C code (68xxx using
the circa-1981 MIT Chris-Terman C compiler no doubt) but for some reason
MIT could never get BBN to *license* them the development system.
(Maybe because BBN was at the same time selling it to the US government
for megabucks). Typical story.

-gjc