I actually tried to post a real announcement on slashdot, but they rejected it. The posting that is on slashdot came from someone reading our website. Whatever...
Way back in days of yore in late 1991/early 1992 there was this thing called X11R5 which came with a somewhat-broken-and-very-slow X server called X386 1.2, which was a version of the previously-free X386 that Thomas Roell and Mark Snitily had decided to turn into a commercial venture. I and several other people were off trying to (a) fix bugs in X386 1.2, (b) make it faster, or (c) both. On April 9, 1992, I approached Glenn Lai (creater of SpeedUp) and Jim Tsillas (creator of fx86), who were working on performance issues, about merging their performance work with my bugfix work in a unified patch set. An announcement of this initiative was posted on NetNews (probably comp.windows.x and comp.os.unix.i386, as all of us were running commercial Unix at the time). On April 21, 1992, David Dawes approached me, in response to one of my postings, to offer to join up and integrate his bug fixes with mine, and the performance work Glenn and Jim were doing. Thereby completing the original Gang of Four (dubbed thus by Mark Snitily), as the nascent project that became XFree86. Originally, all we were doing was a set of bug fixes to X386 1.2, so we called our project X386 1.2E, which 20-20 hindsight showed to be a very bad name choice. There were three releases of X386 1.2E (1.0.0, 1.0.1, and 1.0.2). The name XFree86 was my suggestion, and the eventual winner, in an internal debate to choose a new name that began August 27, 1992. Most people have forgotten this by now, but the name was a pun, and a slam, against X386, which had been free and then went proprietary/commercial (get it? X386 -> XFree86). Which is also why it bugs the crap out of me when people call it "XFree" - the name is XFree86 for a reason. BTW - the first person to sign up to test this mess was Stephen Hocking, on April 30, 1992. I have no idea if he's still around. And yes, I have all of the email, 10 years worth, to prove all of this :-> I think this email is now my largest contribution to XFree86 in about 6 years. But I'm still here, lurking... -- David Wexelblat, Chief Architect mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] America Online, Inc http://www.aol.com 44900 Prentice Drive - 24B:P06 (703) 265-1158 (voice) Dulles, VA 20166 (703) 265-1301 (fax) Please send private email to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
