Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Chris Hanson]

On Oct 23, 2018, at 11:12 AM, Jim Manley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 3:59 PM Guy Sotomayor Jr <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
> 
>> An (optional) X server (and clients) can be added to the OS (I use them
>> all the time) but
>> is not part of the base install ...
>> 
> 
> Wrong.  Apple has been using self-customized, optimized-for their-hardware
> supersets of the VNC protocol (which is X based) for Screen Sharing since
> early versions of OS X, if not from the beginning, and It's (still) In
> There (per Prego spaghetti sauce ads) in the latest versions of OS X.

VNC is not X11, and not very related to the X11 protocol at all. I say this as someone who has hacked together a partial implementation of VNC in Common Lisp.

Furthermore, what’s used for Screen Sharing has almost no relationship to the technology used for native UI. macOS (and OS X, and Mac OS X, and OPENSTEP/Mach, and NEXTSTEP in its various spellings) do not and never have used X11 as their primary display system.

Prior to Mac OS X 10.0, the operating system used Display PostScript, where the Display PostScript interpreter was colocated with the window server that managed presentation on behalf of applications and routed events to them. As of Mac OS X 10.0, the window server just provides drawing surfaces and event routing, and drawing happens on the application side via a variety of 2D and 3D APIs.

>> BTW, the X server on OS X, interfaces not to the bit-map but instead to the
>> native OS X display rendering framework.
> 
> That's not possible, at least when communicating cross-platform, where
> bitmaps are the only representation.

It’s entirely possible to implement an X server atop some other display technology. There are X servers for Windows. There were X servers for classic Mac OS. There were X servers for Lisp Machines. The X server for macOS, XQuartz, is just an application that applications can talk to using the X11 protocol.

Please be more conscientious in your claims.

  -- Chris