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Re: no linux GUI in 97?



On Sun, Apr 22, 2001, Shaul Karl wrote about "Re: no linux GUI in 97?":
> > > I know that date is wrong, but one of the Captain Internet writers seems
> > > to think that "when linux first showed up in 1997 it had no GUI"..... 
> > > Seems to have strange ideas on when linux showed up.
> 
> Couldn't it be that he meant to write 1 and got a 7? 
> 1991 will fit to `no GUI'.

No, you got it all backwards, in 1991 the GUI had no Linux :)

I think Linux started on 1991 or a little later (if I remember correctly,
I started using it around 1993). X11, which is to this day Linux's
GUI existed way before that...

But it is probably true that the first releases of Linux didn't include
an X-Windows port - after all when your file system isn't working
correctly yet, the last thing you're going to concetrate on is porting 
a huge corpus of software like X-Windows. I remember how a little later
(in 1994) I had at work an old Sun machine with some broken old version
of X-Windows (X11R3). So I brought the entire X11R4 source distribution
from MIT (on a QIC tape), which was around 100MB (this was considered
huge at the time), and compiled the beast. The compilation took many,
many hours. It wasn't something you would want to try on an experimental,
version 0.1, operating system...

History buffs are welcome to check the XFree86 project's page to see how
and when it started porting X11 to PCs. I don't remember ever seeing X11
on AT&T System Vr4 (which ran on PCs with 386 before Linux existed), or
on Microsoft/SCO Xenix (which ran on 286s even earlier). But even earlier,
in 1984, AT&T already had Unix terminals with CRT displays, mice, and
a window-based GUI (but their concept was very different from X11 - I
can elaborate if anyone is interested). Contrary to popular belief,
Microsoft did not invent the GUI :)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Sunday, Apr 22 2001, 30 Nisan 5761
nyh@math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |A thing is not necessarily true because
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |a man dies for it. - Oscar Wilde

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