Work

The X window system

Year: 1986

Type: article

Abstract: An overview of the X Window System is presented, focusing on the system substrate and the low-level facilities provided to build applications and to manage the desktop. The system provides high-performance, high-level, device-independent graphics. A hierarchy of resizable, overlapping windows allows a wide variety of application and user interfaces to be built easily. Network-transparent access to the display provides an important degree of functional separation, without significantly affecting performance, which is crucial to building applications for a distributed environment. To a reasonable extent, desktop management can be custom-tailored to individual environments, without modifying the base system and typically without affecting applications.

Source: ACM Transactions on Graphics

DOI: 10.1145/22949.24053

Authors: Robert W. Scheifler, Jim Gettys

Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Language: English

Topic: Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques

Subfield: Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: bronze