1.2
4 Chapter 1: Introduction to the X Window System
1.2 The History of X
X originated at MIT in 1984. It was a part of Project Athena, a campus-wide, crossplatform
system, and it was loosely based on the W Window System from Stanford.
Before long, Unix vendors started to gain an interest in X. They realized that X would
make it easier to port graphical applications to new hardware, which in turn would
attract independent software vendors (ISVs)??”and the more software became available,
the more systems would be sold.
After a brief flirtation with restrictive licenses, version 11 of the X Window system
was released in 1987 under the MIT license, and a vendor-neutral group called The X
Consortium was formed to manage development. This was one of the earliest examples
of an open source project. In fact, it predates the term open source by more than
a decade. Each vendor used the sample code from the X Consortium as a starting
point and implemented a server tuned for their particular display hardware and operating
system.
Control of X passed from group to group until 1999, when X.org was established by
The Open Group to manage the technology. Unfortunately, official work on X had
almost come to a standstill by that point.
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