Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

It's because X's config files were asking you questions that there was no good way of knowing the answers to other than trial-and-error. (After all, if there was some OS API already available at the time to fetch an objectively-correct answer, the X server would just use that API, and not ask you the question!)

An example of what I personally remember:

I had a PS2 mouse with three mouse-buttons and a two-axis scroll wheel ("scroll nub.") How do I make this mouse work under X? Well, X has to be told what each signal the mouse can send corresponds to. And there's no way to "just check what happens", because any mouse calibration program is relying on the X server to talk directly to the mouse driver — there wasn't yet any raw input-events API separate from X — so in the default X configuration that assumes a two-button mouse, none of the other buttons on the mouse get mapped to an X input event, so the mouse calibration program won't report anything when you try the other parts of the mose.

So instead, you have to make a random guess; start X; see if the mouse works; figure out by the particular way it's wrong what you should be telling X instead; quit X; edit the config file; restart X; ...etc.

(And now imagine this same workflow, but instead of something "forgiving" like your mouse not working, it's your display; and if you set a resolution + bit-depth + refresh rate that add up to more VRAM than you have, X just locks up the computer so hard that you can't switch back to a text console and have to reboot the whole machine.)

It was winter and suddenly his screen was a fuzzy grey, with funny looking windows, instead of the comforting (to me) windows teal.

At the time, it represented to me, a change into the unkonwn. As it was (assume) the start of a new contract (my dad worked at home alot) it was also a time of financial pressure.

So to me, I hated X, and how it looked. It was to me, the equivalent of a brutalist housing block. Well built sure, but foreboding to look at.

Later when I was I was using Linux my self (around redhat 5/6) If you suddenly saw that you were dropping into a "natural" X, It was a sign that you'd fucked up the window manager, or that the switch between gnome and E (or which ever one you were trying) had gone wrong.

I kinda like it now though.

I am not sure why it was the default, I suspect it was to give you a chance to see how your monitor was behaving on a fresh install and you were expected to set the background to something else.. I still run the root weave on my desktop, it is obsd with their xenocera where it is still the default. but I also run a tiling window manager so only actually see the root window once in a blue moon.

Man does it make me feel old that the /etc/X11/XF86Config days don't feel like the 'old days' to me. That stipple takes me back to using TWM on Sun3 workstations because OpenWindows was too slow.

It looked broken, and I assumed it was broken, so I gave up. It took me a long time to get the concept of window managers, but eventually I understood and realized that I had actually gotten X working that time years ago. Gosh.

I used to scrounge around at work to find the highest bandwidth monitors, and then I'd program my own modes with oddball non-VESA resolutions beyond the 1024x768 'standard' of the day.

All this could be figured out by reading the specifications section of the monitors operating manual.

IIRC I used an 90s version of this document to figure it out: X.org/XFree86 Video Timings HOWTO (https://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/index.htm...)

Well, that would kind of spoil the Prince reference

Mine did." HOLY **!

My blood pressure rose, my hands started shaking, and my feet went cold. After someone let out the happy smoke out of a monitor, I would always triple check everything... everything... and then adjust... then change the monitor with the fiberglass screwdriver... you are SCARING ME! but ... the GDM-1907 really did work at 1280x1025, with a front porch in phase.

I remember hacking away at the X Config files for a long time installing slackware on my 486 laptop and some external displays in 1995-1996 and being super worried about breaking stuff.

That was kind of before you could look stuff up easily on the internet, plus you might not have had the modem or ethernet card working in linux yet either.

> Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time.

Heh, basically the opposite for me.

I switched to linux in 2008, Ubuntu on an HP laptop. For the most part it "just worked" and I never really needed to edit the X configs, but I do remember fiddling with them occasionally for some reason. I think it was for some peripheral or other (like a mouse, when I usually used the touchpad).

Generally at the time I'd only see this backround if I was experimenting with my window manager and it crashed. Ubuntu was using Metacity at the time, and I'd switched to Beryl and was going wild with customizations. And when the window manager crashed and all I had was that and windows I couldn't move, I had no idea how to recover and had to hard boot.

I'm fairly sure Ubuntu was hiding this on startup already at that time, if not very shortly afterwards.

The Alto certainly had this, from screenshots i've seen of Smalltalk demos running on it.

The very first version of MacOS had a pattern editor in 1984. Mac System 3.0 (1986) improved this with a number of pre-made patterns. One of the patterns is pixel for pixel identical to "wide-weave".

On the topic of X nostalgia, the monospace font used in TFA appears to be Go Mono, developed for golang. To me, it is heavily evocative of the console font on Sun Microsystems SPARC gear. Brings back another flood of memories.

Oh man good times.

I always assumed that the reason was that it was time when cheap (and low-quality) LCD displays with VGA-only inputs started to appear en-masse. And on most such monitors the stipple pattern often either was displayed incorrectly (smeared) or even prevented the monitor from reliably synchronizing to the signal.

Yes, but only on consumer hardware/OS (linux, *BSD). I remember that Solaris, HP-UX had no such issues on Sun or HP hardware.

but i guess matt t proud is a youngster, or maybe had enough money to have his own linux-capable computer when xfree86 was hard to configure

what's the best 1-bit-deep stipple pattern for this kind of thing? the zorzpad display (same as the playdate one) is 175 dpi and has a lovely deep black but no grays. the x-windows weave pattern cited here seems like a pretty nice option if you're constrained to 4×4:

    # # # .
    # . # #
    # # . #
    . # # #