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.
beej71 · 1h ago
The good old days. We had a bunch of X terminals hooked up with thin net to some HP735 servers in college.
HenryBemis · 1h 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major upgrade they were refreshing the documentation/dossiers) and they would leave on a table a few dozens of the 'outdated' ones.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.
TMWNN · 57m 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.
HenryBemis · 1h ago
The title made me think: the Tesla 'copilot' didn't immediately have a "copilot".
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