It is 40 years since Robert W Scheifler ushered in the era of the X Window System, a windowing system that continues to stick around despite many dist

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

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2024-06-22 13:30:03

It is 40 years since Robert W Scheifler ushered in the era of the X Window System, a windowing system that continues to stick around despite many distributions looking for alternatives.

1984 was a heady time in the computing world. Apple's Macintosh arrived at the beginning of the year. What would become the Commodore Amiga was shown off in prototype form at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and Peter Davison turned into Colin Baker on the long-running BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who.

For Unix users, the year marked the first release of the X Window System, which would race through versions until settling on version 11 (hence X11) in 1987.

The last release, X11R7.7, emerged just over 12 years ago, and at this point, a 7.8 release looks vanishingly unlikely. However, 7.7 has been tweaked over the years with improvements and patched against vulnerabilities.

It was predated by the W Window system, and Scheifler admitted, "I stole a fair amount of code from W," in the initial announcement.