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From: paquin@kahua.esd.sgi.com (Tom Paquin)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A tirade about inefficient software & systems
Message-ID: <1990Nov27.165059.25194@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Date: 27 Nov 90 16:50:59 GMT
References: <9011232028.AA24515@islanders.> <1990Nov27.012631.15725@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News)
Reply-To: paquin@kahua.esd.sgi.com (Tom Paquin)
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc.
Lines: 44

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.
 
|> 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!)
 
|> it's the marketing style of the big 
|> (formerly-Unix-hating-but-now-Unix-loving) companies that I didn't like.

Wow.  You sure don't know what was going on inside IBM back then.  From
what I could see, you don't know what was going on at DEC either.  I guess
I never could know what it looked like from the outside, but any belief
that IBM set out to force X on anything is just about as wrong as you
can be.  IBM's X11 effort was basically a terrified trust in a few very
young not-blue-enough-yet unix people who were working on (shudder) BSD
on RTs.  Even inside that renegade shop, the X work got started because
Erik Fortune disregarded instructions to tweak some boring printer code.
He went home to Boston for Christmas in late 86 and came back 
with an X11 server running.  Before management even knew what was going
on, X was the 4.3 window system for RTs.  Even after we got X up on
all the displays, and on the PS2 stuff, most management still thought
X was a window manager.  The goal in that effort was to satisfy the
universities, and IBM was involved in a rare example of really listening 
to their customers and ignoring those gut feels that they know better.

What is clear to me is that the need or demand for ANY standard window/graphics
system was so acute that almost any serious attempt to solve it would
have been massaged till it worked.  This demand came from the customers
up, not from the companies down.  

Not only did I do a lot of the IBM server work, but I was also involved with 
many of the business deals with CMU, MIT, Brown, etc.  which got this stuff
rolling.  I know.  I was there.  

		-Tom
*****
Opinions are mine, etc.