Hummingbird Exceed

Hummingbird Communications of Toronto sold Exceed from the early 1990s, first for Windows 3.x and then for NT. It does what an X terminal does, but in a window on an ordinary PC: it accepts the X11 protocol over the network, draws the windows locally and sends keyboard and mouse back. With XDMCP a user could log straight into CDE on a Sun or HP box without leaving Windows, which was exactly what finance departments with Unix systems and Windows PCs wanted.

The competition was WRQ Reflection X, NCD PC-Xware and StarNet X-Win32, but Exceed led the market and was priced accordingly, licensed per seat. Open Text bought Hummingbird in 2006 and still sells Exceed, now with a variant that renders on a server instead of pushing raw X requests across slow links. The free competition came from the Cygwin port of XFree86 and from Xming, which was plenty for anyone who only wanted an xterm over SSH.