X Window System (operating system, graphics) A specification for device-independent windowing operations on bitmap display devices, developed initially by MIT's Project Athena and now a de facto standard supported by the X Consortium. X was named after an earlier window system called "W". It is a window system called "X", not a system called "X Windows".
X uses a client-server protocol, the X protocol. The server is the computer or X terminal with the screen, keyboard, mouse and server program and the clients are application programs. Clients may run on the same computer as the server or on a different computer, communicating over Ethernet via TCP/IP protocols. This is confusing because X clients often run on what people usually think of as their server (e.g. a file server) but in X, it is the screen and keyboard etc. which is being "served out" to the applications. X is used on many Unix systems. It has also been described as over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated. X11R6 (version 11, release 6) was released in May 1994. http://x.org/. See also Andrew project, PEX, VNC, XFree86. Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.windows.x, news:comp.x, news:comp.windows.x.apps, news:comp.windows.x.intrinsics, news:comp.windows.x.announce, news:comp.sources.x, news:comp.windows.x.motif, news:comp.windows.x.pex. Last updated: 1999-04-02
