X Window System At 40
I apologize that this post is a little late. On 19th June the X Window System celebrated its 40th birthday. Wikipedia has a comprehensive history of the system including the e-mail Bob Scheifler sent announcing the first release: [...]
Update
In LWN:
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Rosenthal: X Window System At 40
David Rosenthal looks back at 40 years of the X Window System:
A major reason for Sun's early success was that they in effect open-sourced the Network File System. X11 was open source under the MIT license. I, and some of the other Sun engineers, understood that NeWS could not displace X11 as the Unix standard window system without being equally open source. But Sun's management looked at NeWS and saw superior technology, an extension of the PostScript that Adobe was selling, and couldn't bring themselves to give it away.