[GRLUG] multiple login on Mac

[Robar Philip]

On Jan 7, 2012, at 2:30 PM, Bob Kline wrote:

> I believe Sun was going to run X on everything, but then
> discovered it was too slow for the CPUs of the time.

I don’t understand what you mean by “was” and "everything.” We shipped NeWS and X11/NeWS on i386/i486/MC680x0 class machines. CPU speed was a minor concern compared to the limitations of GPUs of the time. (Back then even most workstations shipped with a monochrome or 8 bit GPU. Oh color map flashing, how I don’t miss you.)

> Probably wouldn't be true today, and X is open, but there’d
> still be the bandwidth issue for many remote users.

Today, bandwidth is a non-issue for the X Window System*. One of the major advantages of X11 is that it doesn't ship around bits. It’s a client/server system. You run a graphics server locally and the remote client just sends you drawing instructions—no bits. Back in the day I accessed remote clients over a modem to work from home. It was a tolerable experience.

> Besides which Apple is not noted for its interest in open software.

Not to be too harsh, but this is simply wrong. OS X’s core, Darwin, is open source. You can download and run it on your home PC if you like. The UNIX(™) user layer comes from FreeBSD. Apple ships and contributes to open source projects such as Bash, SAMBA (prior to OS X 10.7), Apache, GCC, Clang/LLVM, Dovecot/Cyrus, Python, PERL, Ruby and many others.


Phil

* It’s the "X Window System”, not “X Windows.” :-)

BTW, if you want to see what a fast window system is like, track down a machine running Sun's SunView. Even on a Motorola 68K machine with a megabyte (or less) of memory it puts today’s window systems to shame.


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