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From: erik@westworld.esd.sgi.com (Erik Fortune)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A tirade about inefficient software & systems
Message-ID: <1990Nov27.012631.15725@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Date: 27 Nov 90 01:26:31 GMT
References: <9011232028.AA24515@islanders.>
Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News)
Reply-To: erik@westworld.esd.sgi.com (Erik Fortune)
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc.
Lines: 71

In article <9011232028.AA24515@islanders.>, fgreco@dprg-330.GOVt.shearson.COM (Frank Greco) writes:
>So did many other Sun reps.  This was after X was artificially called
>a standard by DEC/IBM (and to a degree HP).  And after many, many articles by
>DEC people saying "X is de facto standard" over and over again, when a small 
>minority was actually even using X.  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Get your facts straight.  (Most of) IBM was dragged kicking and screaming into X.
The only people in IBM who were remotely enthusiastic about X were a bizarre 
little business unit in california who dealt with universities and technical customers.

I was a part of that business unit, and I was the *only* person porting X11 servers
at IBM in the early days of X11.   I spent a lot of my time fighting off presentation
manager and other assorted proprietary IBM stuff.

What were you working on in 1986?   I was writing window systems, and in the UNIX window
systems world it looked like X10 was well on its way to becoming a standard.  This 
terrified enough people (mostly universities and weirdos in assorted advanced development
labs) that X11 got designed and written *quickly*.    The biggest likely competitor
for X was CMU's wm window manager.   NeWS was this interesting research thing that
Gosling was working on.   Lots of people had concerns about problems in NeWS, and
it was certainly too young to be considered as a standard.   Also, it was proprietary
and likely to remain so.

One of the things that was cool about X in the early days was the fact that it wasn't
proprietary.   I worked alongside people from DEC, HP, Apollo and Sun.

>Back in the old days of X10, there was a Miniscule amount of people using X.
>That's understandable, X was in its formative years.
>That's my whole point.  Why was it called a standard when only a tiny 
>fraction of the computing community used it?  You cannot dictate
>standards like this.  It may be a de facto standard now, but back
>then, it wasn't.  Should we be also declaring Postgres an industry standard?
>Should we declare VPL's DataGlove a standard user interface?
>How about calling Speculative Execution a de facto standard for handling
>superscalar opcode management?  Can we demand fractal data compression as
>the industry standard for our Fax machines?.... you get the idea.

This was exactly the reason that NeWS was considered an interesting research
project but not ready for standardization.  It was too way too young and
untested.

X had been through 9 releases (one number was reserved but never used) and
the X community had learned a lot from those first 10 releases.   Lots of
the lessons learned from those early releases of X were applied to X11.
That experience also pointed to some likely problems with the design of NeWS.
Bob wrote a paper describing some of his concerns about NeWS in late 1986.
I'll see if I can dig up a copy...

In 1986 it was widely believed that what UNIX really, really needed yesterday
was standard graphics.    The only things that were not proprietary and were 
remotely close to being understood well enough to be standardized were X10 and wm, 
neither of which was acceptable.   Hence X11.

>Besides...sigh..., the key word here is "foisted".  Foisted does
>NOT mean invented....(you know how much email I got explaining
>how X got "invented"!...sheesh!)
>
>I am not denigrating the efforts of the MIT people at all.  I applaud their
>tremendous efforts, it's the marketing style of the big 
>(formerly-Unix-hating-but-now-Unix-loving) companies that I didn't like.
>
>
>Frank G.

Your beliefs about the X community circa 1986 are really way off base (and potentially
insulting to lots of people who've worked very hard).  X did not come out of anybody's 
anti-UNIX corporate headquarters.   X came out of the universities and assorted corporate
advanced development labs.    X was embraced by the *Unix* people in these companies
to counter the "look at our spiffy proprietary stuff, Unix is so primitive" mentality.

-- Erik