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@claudiom The perspective of this article is so funny to me. It seems to be saying that X terminals were somehow the “killer app” for X Windows and the only technology to truly take advantage of X Windows’ display transparency.

Having come of age in the X10 days, I can assure you that X Windows was designed for running on workstations. X Terminals were frankly a solution in search of a problem and never achieved a fraction of the penetration of X Windows on workstations.

The best use of remote display was a virtual wind tunnel project I worked on at NASA in the early 90s. Run your fluid dynamics simulation on a supercomputer and display real-time airflow over a surface on an SGI Indy workstation. Neat stuff for the time. Now my kids’ video game console can render a thousand times faster than what we were doing back then.