Always a good read, but it needs an update with modern cultural references. Even I, nearly middle aged, have very little idea what it means to compare X.org to Iran-Contra and Regan's spending habits.
I believe the allegory (I was a kid at the time ), is that, just as Iran-Contra involved alliances of convenience between enemies and spending a lot of money, X.org (or the MIT X11 group) & all the Unix Vendors & DEC VMS, were trying to find a way to sort of standardize a Unix GUI, while also trying to siphon their competitors customers and lock them into their own proprietary systems.
Maybe FAAANG, they want to eat each others users, but also not have the government interfere, especially in avoiding taxes.
Here's American Dad giving a brief, basically factual < 2min, musical overview of Iran-Contra.
The Unix-Haters Handbook was published in 1994, two years before the Open Group was founded in 1996, three years before they took over the X-Window system in 1997, five years before the formation of X.org, and ten years after X-Windows was released in 1984. XFree86 was not very widely used in 1994, most people were running the original X server on non-x86 and RISC workstations at the time (Sun SPARC, SGI MIPS, DEC Microvax and Alpha, HP PA-RISC, NCD X-Terminal, etc). The Open Group had absolutely nothing to do with the design of the X11 protocol, the server implementation, or XLib.
I've quite frequently written about X11, NeWS, Wayland, window management, HyperCard, web browsers, and user interface toolkits on Hacker News:
DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–]
(An excerpt from another longer reply I just posted):
From: npg@East (Neil Groundwater - Sun Consulting)
Date: Wed, Jun 27, 1990
Subject: Humor from Dennis Ritchie (at USENIX)
(Actually Dennis's latter remark was attributed by him to Rob Pike)
from Unix Today 6/25 page 5.
"..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium
a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die. "He
was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still
sucks."
DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: The X-Windows Disaster (1994)
The window system needs to be displayed somehow too. What works for the window system works for the browser too. There's no need for an additional layer of widow system once you have a browser that can draw on the screen itself. A web browser can make a much better scriptable window manager / desktop environment all by itself, than anything that's possible with X-Windows.
code_duck on March 6, 2020 [–]
The comment I replied to said that X and Wayland were being overrun by web apps, which doesn't make any sense at all.
NB as this article reminds us, there is no system called X- Windows.
DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent [–]
If you want to be pedantic, I didn't call it "X- Windows". I called it "X-Windows". Nobody ever puts a space between the "X-" and the "Windows". The title of the article we're discussing that I wrote and named uses the term "X-Windows" because I specifically told the editors of the book to spell the name that way on purpose, to annoy X fanatics. That fact was stated in the last sentence of the article.
So what is there about drawing on the screen and handling input events and handling network requests that a window system can do, but a web browser can't? Why does there need to be a window system, if you already have a web browser?
Does you phone have a web browser? Does it also have a window system too? How often do you open and close icons and move and resize windows around on your phone, compared to how often you browse the web on your phone? Name one thing a window system can do that a web browser can't these days.
For example, is this a web browser or a window system?
You should read up on the history of window management and alternative designs for window systems and interactive graphical user interfaces. Things weren't always the way they are now, and there are many different ways of doing things, that are a hell of a lot better than the status quo. Back before everybody blindly imitated Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft because they didn't know any better and never experienced anything different, there were a lot of interesting original ideas. But now everybody's into Cargo Cult programming and interface design, blindly imitating shallow surface appearances and over-reacting to the latest trendy craze (like flat design) that was an over-reaction to the previous trendy craze (like skeuomorphism), without ever looking deeper into the reasons, or god forbid scientific studies and research and user testing, or further back than a few months into the past, and never understanding why things are the way they are, or how and why they got to be that way.
To illustrate my point, and lead you to enlightenment (and I don't mean the Enlightenment window manager):
Here is one of Gosling's earlier papers about NeWS (originally called "SunDew"), published in 1985 at an Alvey Workshop, and the next year in an excellent Springer Verlag book called "Methodology of Window Management" that is now available online for free. [1]
Chapter 5: SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System, by James Gosling [2]
Another interesting chapter is Warren Teitelman's "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View". [3]
Also, the Architecture Working Group Discussion [4] and Final Report [5], and the API Task Group [6] have a treasure trove of interesting and prescient discussion between some amazing people.
F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams
29 April 1985
This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme.
The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986.
5. SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System
James Gosling
SunDew is a distributed, extensible window system that is currently being developed at SUN. It has arisen out of an effort to step back and examine various window system issues without the usual product development constraints. It should really be viewed as speculative research into the right way to build a window system. We started out by looking at a number of window systems and clients of window systems, and came up with a set of goals. From those goals, and a little bit of inspiration, we came up with a design.
sicnus on March 5, 2020 | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Oh, I wanna hop in on this train. tell that fool to man X yo. ;)
I've been getting pissed about people calling it "X Windows" since 1995 so there.
DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–]
You made my day! I'm so delighted to hear you're pissed that people call it X-Windows. ;) Thank you for letting me know my long term project of always calling it X-Windows worked perfectly as planned. I've been systematically calling it X-Windows to piss people off since June 1988, when I read the article "Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’" in my copy of Volume 1 Number 2 of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group” (which I quoted above):
>Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title.
Bill Joy referred to X-Windows as "Rasterop on Wheels".
I gave a NeWS/Pie Menus/HyperTies/Emacs demo to Steve Jobs once, on the trade show floor at the Educom conference, right after he finally released the NeXT Machine, in November of 1988.
Sun was letting me demo NeWS and the stuff we were developing at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a workstation at their booth, and NeXT's booth was right across the aisle, so Ben Shneiderman rope-a-doped him and dragged him over for a demo. He jumped up and down and yelled "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat. That sucks!"
I figure a 3:1 sucks:neat ratio was pretty good for him comparing something different than his newborn baby NeXT Step, which critics had taken to calling NeVR Step, since it had been vaporware for so long until then.
When I tried to explain to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"
Here's Ben's account (I love how he gently put it that "Jobs had little patience with the academic side of things" -- and by "engage" he meant "jump up and down and yell"):
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 88 07:55:48 EST
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
To: hcil@tove.umd.edu
Subject: steve jobs visit
I just couldn't resist telling this story....
On Tuesday I was at the EDUCOM conference in DC and Steve Jobs was showing
NeXT...I was quite impressed...a nice step forward, improving, refining
and developing good ideas. I invited him to see our Hyperties SUN version
that we were showing at the SUN booth. The gang managed to get the new
NeWS version working and the Space Telescope looked great...Jobs spent
about a half hour with us going from positive comments such as "Great!"
to "That sucks"...he had a terrific sensitivity to the user interface
issues and could articulate his reasons wonderfully.
On Wednesday he came out to the lab and spent time looking at a few more
of our demos...the students (and me too) were delighted to have him as
a visitor.
What impresses me is that he took his ideas and really put them to work...
pushing back the frontier a bit further. His system really works and
has much attractive in the hardware and software domains. Jobs had little
patience with the academic side of things, but was very ready to engage
over interface issues.
Do check out NeXT...there are things to criticize, but I did come away
more impressed and pleased than ready to pick at the flaws.
-- Ben
>X Windows is the Israel-Palestine of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X Windows is to memory as Donald Trump was to money.
>X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats—like Sun’s Open Look clock
tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all
the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have
enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility consumes 656K to run. And X’s memory usage is increasing.
The Clock Tool : C64 memory usage numbers were accurate, but I'll admit that the $5,000 toilet seat reference was a slightly gratuitous (but ultimately prescient) 781.25% exaggeration about the time when US Government under the Reagan Administration spent $37 per screw, $7,622 per coffee maker, and $640 per toilet seat (and it wasn't even made of enough gold to support Trump's vainglorious ass and ego, or even certified for the theft, storage, sale, or disposal of classified documents!), but in 2018 the Air Force paid $10,000 each for three toilet covers.
But the comparison of the level of government waste of money to the level of X-Windows waste of memory has survived the test of time and is still apt.
$37 screws, a $7,622 coffee maker, $640 toilet seats; : suppliers to our military just won’t be oversold
[...] Remember when we found out that the government paid $640 each for plastic toilet seats for military airplanes? Now that was something I could feel that I personally paid for. I pay a good deal more than $640 in taxes every year, and I probably paid for several of those toilet seats. That is a concrete contribution that I can be proud of. [...]
Dept. of Hundred-Dollar Toilet Seats.
Special to the New York Times, Feb. 18, 1986.
Disclosures about the Defense Department paying hundreds of dollars for a hammer and hundreds more for a toilet seat have infuriated President Reagan, who has called the reports a ''constant drumbeat of propaganda'' and not typical of the way the Government operates.
But that ''propaganda,'' the President apparently forgot or did not know, originated with a commission on governmental efficiency for which he has been full of praise, the Grace Commission.
Gregg N. Lightbody, a spokesman for the commission, officially known as the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, said the group's educational arm, Citizens Against Government Waste, would continue to use the example of the costly hammer in its messages identifying faults in Government spending and procurement, even though the example might be ''an isolated instance.''
Mr. Reagan has denied the accuracy of the accounts twice in the last week and placed his faith in another panel, the President's Commission on Defense Management, to help clear up what he considers to be misconceptions about the Government. The defense management commission is expected to issue a report Feb. 28 that ''will help us in trying to make the people understand,'' Mr. Reagan said.
But Herb Hetu, a spokesman for that commission, says its report will not address the hammers or the toilet seats, at least not directly. Instead, Mr. Hetu said, the statement on procurement will look at the broader issues of Defense Department organization and will recommend ways to streamline purchasing.
The hammers and the toilet seats, along with coffee makers alleged to have cost thousands of dollars, Mr. Hetu said, ''are just symptoms of problems in the system.''
''The commission didn't look at the symptoms so much as it did the larger problems,'' he said.
The larger problems, he continued, are the result of years of additional regulations and well-intentioned efforts to tinker with procurement procedures without addressing them wholesale. ''It just got out of hand,'' he said. The commission's recommendations, Mr. Hetu said, will try to restructure purchasing so as to eliminate the problems that produced the symptoms. In particular, he said, the commission will suggest that the Defense Department grant more control and responsibility to lower-level managers, enabling them to investigate and prevent outrageous expenditures instead of merely passing the approval of such expenditures along to their superiors. After releasing its report Feb. 28, the commission will work on complete recommendations for a broader re-structuring of other military programs. Its final work is scheduled to be released June 30.
The Air Force’s $10,000 toilet cover. By Aaron Gregg, July 14, 2018 at 8:57 p.m. EDT.
A latrine cover for a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane used by the Air Force, designed to protect the area from corrosion. The Air Force paid a contractor $10,000 for this item on three separate occasions, most recently in 2017, before the service started using 3-D printing to make the part. (U.S. Air Force)
Serially bankrupt casino operator and former reality television figure Donald Trump became US President after losing the popular vote by 2.1%, 2,868,686 votes, but winning the electoral vote. So, with what the U.S. government's intelligence agencies concluded was assistance from the Russian government, Trump was President.
Trump, whose father was arrested after participating in a Ku Klux Klan march, and who has a long history of racial discrimination, decorates his palace-like homes in the style of dictators Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Gold (or at least gilding), marble, and over-the-top kitsch.
Trump and his third wife, Slovenian nude model Melanija Knavs, who had Germanized her name to Melania Knauss before applying for permanent residency in the U.S., moved into the White House.
Earlier in 2016, the artist Maurizio Cattelan had returned from retirement with a special project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His America (2016) replaced a toilet in one of the museum's public restrooms with a fully functional toilet cast in solid 18-carat gold. This was his first project since his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim and planned retirement. It opened in late September, 2016, with plans to remain there indefinitely. From the museum's description of this piece:
Cattelan's toilet offers a wink to the excesses of the art market, but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all, its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity.
[...] Then, in September 2017, a White House spokesperson wrote to the Guggenheim Museum, asking if the Trumps could borrow Landscape With Snow, a Vincent van Gogh painting, to decorate the Presidential residence.
