X Window System
<operating system, graphics> A specification for device-independent windowing operations on
bitmap display devices, developed initially by
MIT's Project
Athena and now a
de facto standard supported by the
X Consortium.
X was named after an earlier window system called "W".
It is a window system called "X", not a system called "X Windows".
X uses a
client-server protocol, the
X protocol.
The server is the computer or
X terminal with the screen, keyboard, mouse and server program and the clients are application programs.
Clients may run on the same computer as the server or on a different computer, communicating over
Ethernet via
TCP/IP protocols.
This is confusing because X clients often run on what people usually think of as their server (e.g. a file server) but in X, it is the screen and keyboard etc. which is being "served out" to the applications.
X is used on many
Unix systems.
It has also been described as over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated.
X11R6 (version 11, release 6) was released in May 1994.
Home (http://www.x.org/).
See also
Andrew project,
PEX, VNC, XFree86.
Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.windows.x, news:comp.x, news:comp.windows.x.apps, news:comp.windows.x.intrinsics, news:comp.windows.x.announce, news:comp.sources.x, news:comp.windows.x.motif, news:comp.windows.x.pex.
