X originally was created on/ran on a graphics terminal - the DEC VAXstation 100. The VS100 was quite different to the later X thin client terminals: it required an adapter card to be installed in a host system, and the software which ran on the VS100 could directly access a chunk of shared memory on the host.
Ports to workstations with inbuilt graphics hardware came later.
For anyone just reading the title: It's about physical thin-client X11 server machines, not xterm.
dfox · 3h ago
As for NCD X terminals (at least the later ones), surprising amount of stuff could run directly on the terminal (which ran some weird MMU-less BSD variant): mwm and motif session manager, dtterm-like terminal with telnet and serial port support, some kind of JVM and two different variants of mosaic were part of the SW package (it booted either from flash PC card or from NFS).
ggm · 5h ago
I had to both administer, and operate on the early X terminals from several vendors they were interesting. Labtam made strides developing boxes using the more novel Intel chips and this may have been what they sold on when they got out of the business and moved to being an ISP in Australia.
I enjoyed using blits and the early dec Ultrix workstations.
Thin X terminals were super cool. But, also really stressed out your Ethernet, and because we didn't have good audio models in X at that time, when multimedia became viable they stopped being as useful. But for a distraction free multiple term, low overhead wm world... super good price performance cost.
wkat4242 · 4h ago
I was surprised how a room of top notch 1280x1024 terminals was able to function so well on a shared 10mbps with pretty bad collision detection to boot. X apps of the day were super optimised for local drawing. Even games were super smooth. Toolkits like Motif were all draw calls. By the way back then we thought Motif was bloated lol :)
And then... Came the internet. People suddenly started running NCSA Mosaic in droves that bogged down the single core server. And those browsers started to push lots of bitmap stuff through the pipe to the terminals. Now that was bad, yes. When Netscape came with its image backgrounds and even heavier process people started moving away to the PC rooms :( Because all scroll content needed to be bitstreamed then.
Ps video content at that time wasn't even a thing yet. That came a bit later with realvideo first.
But there was a time when X terminals were more than sufficient, probably for a decade or so.
bmacho · 3h ago
> Because all scroll content needed to be bitstreamed then.
Is it better now? Can a browser locally scroll an image, without restreaming it?
londons_explore · 1h ago
A modern browser (ie. chromium) uses the GPU for all drawing.
The basic idea is that HTML content is drawn in transparent 'tiles' which are layered on top of one another. When the user scrolls, the tiles don't need to be redrawn, but instead just re-composited at their new positions. GPU's are super fast at that, and even a 15 year old GPU can easily do this for tens of layers at 60 FPS.
On a linux with a remote X server, I think the tiles would all end up on the X server, with only the pretty small 'draw tile number 22 at this location' going across the network. So the answer to your question is 'yes'.
kristianp · 3h ago
I remember using xterms to do assignments in modula 2 in about 1993. They were 1 bit screens, I think they were square 1024x1024. Very high resolution for the time.
pjmlp · 2h ago
At my university we had a couple of X terminals from IBM, connecting into DG/UX, and I can certaily vouch that for early 1990's they weren't that cheap to acquire.
If memory serves me right, we had four of them on the student lab.
Everyone else could enjoy connecting to DG/UX via terminal app on Windows for Workgroups, or the older green and ambar text based phosphor terminals.
As anecdote, those big screen X terminals were quite often used to have four parallel sessions of mixes using talk and some MUD game.
bluGill · 4m ago
They were cheap compared to the cost of the workstation they connected to. But nobody would call them cheap even if you look at the price today without adjusting for inflation.
pantulis · 2h ago
We had like 4 Tektronix X Terminals that could connect to Sun workstations for those fortunate to have accounts, the rest was using VT terminals to a VAX. And yes, the talk and MUD use cases where popular ;)
beej71 · 7h ago
The good old days. We had a bunch of X terminals hooked up with thin net to some HP735 servers in college.
HenryBemis · 6h ago
In those good old days my Uni was giving away those bulky Unix "manuals" (after every major upgrade they were refreshing the documentation/dossiers) and they would leave on a table a few dozens of the 'outdated' ones. Everyone would grab one and it was a first-come-first-served, and you could end up in a 'useless' dossier, but still they were amazing reads.
bluGill · 3m ago
I miss the days of useful manuals. They were hard and expensive to write, but they had a wealth of technical information that is often impossible to find today.
aa-jv · 4h ago
For most of the latter part of the 80's, I used Quarterdeck Desqview as my 'terminal', which allowed me to have 4 independent concurrent MSDOS sessions running on my 386, each of which with its own video and network connectivity, so that I could telnet into my MIPS Magnum pizzabox and do some work.
At the beginning of the 90p's, I was on the hunt for an alternative to the MSDOS part when, eventually, I tried minix instead .. and that led to replacing it with Linux as soon as it was available on funet. Multiple runs to Fry's to get more RAM and some CPU upgrades later, and I was soon compiling an X/Windows setup on my brand new 486 with 16 Megabytes of RAM .. and about a week after that, I replaced my Quarterdeck setup with a functioning Linux workstation, thorns and warts and all. That was a nice kick in the pants of the operators who were threatening to take away my pizzabox, but it was short-lived joy, as not long thereafter I was able to afford an Indy, which served great for the purpose all through the 90's - and my Linux systems were relegated off the desktop to function as 'servers', once more.
But I always wondered about Quarterdecks' Desqview/X variant, and whether that would have been an alternative solution to the multi-term problem. It seems to me that this was available in 1987/88, which is odd given the articles' claims that X workstations weren't really widespread around that period.
rjsw · 3h ago
I ran my own port of X11 on top of Interactive Systems 386/ix running on a 386 in 1987/88.
aa-jv · 59m ago
Nice, I remember poking at that a few times but never being able to justify a license purchase to my boss, who believed that I had everything I needed in the form of the Magnum pizzabox, and why would anyone need a UI for programming, lol ..
TMWNN · 6h ago
I presume that X terminals did not appear at the same time as X Window because Project Athena <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena>, which created X, had its users use "real" workstations from the start, the IBM RT PC being the first. I don't know if MIT ever deployed any X terminals but, as I understand it, one of the tenets of Athena is that every workstation is a full-fledged remote login-capable node of the Athena cluster.
anthk · 4h ago
The Linux Gazzete had several articles on that, one of them from Andorra.
Ports to workstations with inbuilt graphics hardware came later.
References:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation#VAXstation_100
I enjoyed using blits and the early dec Ultrix workstations.
Thin X terminals were super cool. But, also really stressed out your Ethernet, and because we didn't have good audio models in X at that time, when multimedia became viable they stopped being as useful. But for a distraction free multiple term, low overhead wm world... super good price performance cost.
And then... Came the internet. People suddenly started running NCSA Mosaic in droves that bogged down the single core server. And those browsers started to push lots of bitmap stuff through the pipe to the terminals. Now that was bad, yes. When Netscape came with its image backgrounds and even heavier process people started moving away to the PC rooms :( Because all scroll content needed to be bitstreamed then.
Ps video content at that time wasn't even a thing yet. That came a bit later with realvideo first.
But there was a time when X terminals were more than sufficient, probably for a decade or so.
Is it better now? Can a browser locally scroll an image, without restreaming it?
Here is an awesome (slightly outdated) talk about the architecture: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/AK_rw...
The basic idea is that HTML content is drawn in transparent 'tiles' which are layered on top of one another. When the user scrolls, the tiles don't need to be redrawn, but instead just re-composited at their new positions. GPU's are super fast at that, and even a 15 year old GPU can easily do this for tens of layers at 60 FPS.
On a linux with a remote X server, I think the tiles would all end up on the X server, with only the pretty small 'draw tile number 22 at this location' going across the network. So the answer to your question is 'yes'.
If memory serves me right, we had four of them on the student lab.
Everyone else could enjoy connecting to DG/UX via terminal app on Windows for Workgroups, or the older green and ambar text based phosphor terminals.
As anecdote, those big screen X terminals were quite often used to have four parallel sessions of mixes using talk and some MUD game.
At the beginning of the 90p's, I was on the hunt for an alternative to the MSDOS part when, eventually, I tried minix instead .. and that led to replacing it with Linux as soon as it was available on funet. Multiple runs to Fry's to get more RAM and some CPU upgrades later, and I was soon compiling an X/Windows setup on my brand new 486 with 16 Megabytes of RAM .. and about a week after that, I replaced my Quarterdeck setup with a functioning Linux workstation, thorns and warts and all. That was a nice kick in the pants of the operators who were threatening to take away my pizzabox, but it was short-lived joy, as not long thereafter I was able to afford an Indy, which served great for the purpose all through the 90's - and my Linux systems were relegated off the desktop to function as 'servers', once more.
But I always wondered about Quarterdecks' Desqview/X variant, and whether that would have been an alternative solution to the multi-term problem. It seems to me that this was available in 1987/88, which is odd given the articles' claims that X workstations weren't really widespread around that period.
Great times.
https://linuxgazette.net/issue45/ward/ward.html