Bob Scheifler
More info
- Known for
- Principal architect of the X Window System, director of the X Consortium
- Nationality
- American
The principal architect of the X Window System, who wrote the protocol in 1984 and then ran the X Consortium for eight years.
Robert W. Scheifler was at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, working in Barbara Liskov's group on the distributed language Argus, when in 1984 he needed a window system for the group's workstations. He started from Stanford's W, replaced its synchronous calls with asynchronous ones and named the result after the next letter of the alphabet. Together with Jim Gettys, on loan from DEC to Project Athena, he settled the design: a network protocol between programs and the display, with no opinions about how anything should look. Scheifler wrote the protocol specification itself, and he is the one who decided that the "server" is the screen.
When X11 became an industry standard in 1987 he became director of the MIT X Consortium, which stewarded the system from 1988 to 1996, and he presided over the releases from X11R2 through X11R6. In 1999 he, Gettys and Ron Newman received the ACM Software System Award for X. He then moved to Sun, where he was the architect of Jini, an attempt to let Java devices find each other on a network without a central directory. It did not prove as durable as X.