X-window-system

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.
(http://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.
(1999-04-02)