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@khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko X11 was a network protocol. It came from project Athena, launched in 1983 as a joint project between MIT, DEC and IBM to produce a "campus-wide computing environment".

X11 was designed to pop up GUI windows on a different physical machine than the program was running on, potentially with different OS on different hardware at each end. That was central to the design.

The xfree86 clowns broke a lot of that over the years "optimizing", but that's not X11's fault.