X386

Until 1991, running the X window system meant owning a workstation from Sun, DEC or HP, or buying an expensive X terminal. Thomas Roell wrote a server for 386 machines running System V Release 4, with support for VGA and a handful of Super VGA cards, and version 1.1 shipped as a contributed program in X11R5 that same year. Suddenly a PC costing a few thousand dollars could run the same graphics environment as a workstation costing ten times as much.

What followed went commercial. Roell and the consultancy SGCS developed 1.2 as a product, and the free branch stalled. In 1992 four developers took the last free code and carried it on as XFree86, a pun on X386. Roell himself later founded Xi Graphics and sold Accelerated-X, a paid server for Linux whose drivers were for years better than the free ones. It was the XFree86 branch that survived, became X.Org, and still draws windows on most Linux machines that have not moved to Wayland.