The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals
8 comments
·June 23, 2025ggm
wkat4242
I was surprised how a room for 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.
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. Now that was bad, yes. When Netscape came with it's image backgrounds and even heavier process people started moving away to the PC rooms:(
ch_123
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.
References:
yjftsjthsd-h
For anyone just reading the title: It's about physical thin-client X11 server machines, not xterm.
beej71
The good old days. We had a bunch of X terminals hooked up with thin net to some HP735 servers in college.
HenryBemis
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major upgrade they were refreshing the documentation/dossiers) and they would leave on a table a few dozens of the 'outdated' ones.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
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
The title made me think: the Tesla 'copilot' didn't immediately have a "copilot".
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.