[Info-vax] openvms and xterm

[Dan Cross]

In article <v00lb8$3nik6$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq  <devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
>On 4/20/24 02:23, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
>> On 4/19/2024 8:05 PM, chrisq wrote:
>> 
>>> Absolutely, Solaris, Linux, Freebsd and even cygwin + X + xfce4, all 
>>> depend on X11 at core. VMS as well, though not sure of current status.
>> 
>> That's a pretty pliable definition of "depend on" regarding VMS, since
>> there is literally no dependency on X11 within VMS.
>> 
>> Yeah, if you want a non-character cell interface, then X11 is the only 
>> option
>> on VMS, but to claim a dependency is a bit much.  Even then, your X11 
>> experience will be using a lot of DECterm windows most of the time.
>
>Sigh,
>
>Perhaps a poor choice of words, but are there any desktop / GUI systems,
>other than windows, that do not depend on X11 ?

Sure!  Tons, both historical and contemporary.  The obvious
modern examples are ChromeOS and macOS, both of which are highly
graphical, neither of which uses X11 natively (but support for X
exists for at least macOS, and I believe for ChromeOS as well).

The Plan 9 graphical environment, Rio, does not use X11.

Historical examples abound: the Blit; VGTS and W on the V
microkernel; CMU's WM; MGR; the Xerox Alto, Star, etc; Sun's
SunTools/SunView; SGI's MEX; I would argue Sun's NeWS initially,
etc.  Even the initial graphical system on SRI's NTS.

>The point was that it
>is a standard, and not optional. Can't remember if the old Motif based
>CDE used X11 libs or not, but that's long gone anyway. VWS, ditto...

Motif was a user interface toolkit built on top of X and most
Motif applications used the underlying X libraries (Xlib, the
intrinsics toolkit, etc).  The main competitor was Sun's
OpenLook toolkit, which was in some ways better, but didn't
quite grab the industry.  DECWindows was clearly based on Motif,
but X on VMS always felt a bit like an impedence mismatch.  I
guess it worked OK.  ost serious Unix people ran a more minimal
window manager (ctwm, tvtwm, twm, uwm, etc).

	- Dan C.