| Original author(s) | Paul Asente, Brian Reid |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Stanford University |
| Operating system | V operating system |
| Successor | X Window System |
| Type | Windowing system |
The W Window System, or simply W, is a discontinued windowing system and precursor, in name and concept, to the modern X Window System.
W was originally developed at Stanford University by Paul Asente and Brian Reid for the V operating system. In 1983, Paul Asente and Chris Kent ported the system to UNIX on the VS100, giving a copy to those working at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. [1]
In 1984, Bob Scheifler of MIT replaced the synchronous protocol of W with an asynchronous alternative and named the result X. [2]
Since this time, the X window system has gone through many fundamental changes and no longer bears any significant resemblance to W.
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.
The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
Blackbox is a free and open-source stacking window manager for the X Window System.
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. As of 2023, Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.
Robert William Scheifler is an American computer scientist. He was born in Kirkwood, Missouri. He is most notable for leading the development of the X Window System from the project's inception in 1984 until the closure of the MIT X Consortium in 1996. He later became one of the architects of the Jini architecture at Sun Microsystems.
In computing, the X Window System is a network-transparent windowing system for bitmap displays. This article details the protocols and technical structure of X11.
X Toolkit Intrinsics is a library that implements an API to facilitate the development of programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) for the X Window System. It can be used in the C language. Design took place late 1980s to early 1990s.
X Athena Widgets or Xaw is a GUI widget library for the X Window System. Developed as part of Project Athena, Xaw was written under the auspices of the MIT X Consortium as a sample widget set built on X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt); Xt and Xaw are collectively known as the X Toolkit. Xaw has been largely superseded by more sophisticated toolkits like Motif, and later toolkits such as GTK, and Qt, but it is still maintained and is available as part of most X Window System installations. The library, like other core parts of X, is licensed under the MIT License.
Xming is an X11 display server for Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows XP and later.
XCB is a library implementing the client-side of the X11 display server protocol. XCB is written in the C programming language and distributed under the MIT License. The project was started in 2001 by Bart Massey and aims to replace Xlib.
dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally much simpler. dwm is written purely in C for performance and lacks any configuration interface besides editing the source code. One of the project's guidelines is that the source code is intended never to exceed 2000 SLOC, and options meant to be user-configurable are all contained in a single header file.
Joel McCormack is an American computer scientist who designed the NCR Corporation version of the p-code machine, which is a kind of stack machine popular in the 1970s as the preferred way to implement new computing architectures and languages such as Pascal and BCPL. The NCR design shares no common architecture with the Pascal MicroEngine designed by Western Digital but both were meant to execute the UCSD p-System.[1,2]
Xsgi is the X Window System (X11) server for the IRIX-based graphical workstations and servers from Silicon Graphics (SGI). Xsgi was released in 1991 with IRIX 4.0 on the SGI Indigo workstation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to free software and the free software movement:
Xft, the X FreeType interface library, is a free computer program library written by Keith Packard. It uses the MIT/X license that The Open Group applied after the post X11R6.4 license restoration.
Utopia is the name of a transitional serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and released by Adobe Systems in 1989.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
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