Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipple.html

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

219 145 2 years ago

matttproud.com

cmiller12• 2 years ago

Using a stipple pattern for the background goes back way further than X. IIRC the XEROX GUI had one.

kragen10• 2 years ago

sure, on a 1-bit display the only other options are solid black and solid white

hulitu3• 2 years ago

Just like in Windows 10. /s

floren• 2 years ago

Well, you'd want some pattern, because on a 1-bit display your only choices otherwise are pure white or pure black, both of which kind of suck. The Blit terminal also used a stippled pattern, I think the Perq did the same, etc.

I think the interesting thing about the X background is that it's not a simple stipple, it's actually a pattern that looks very much like woven fabric.

crazygringo2• 2 years ago

It is actually a pretty unique pattern. It's not one of the standard patterns that you found, for example, in the original MacPaint:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/MacpaintWP.pn...

And you could set desktop patterns but I can't find any list of what the defaults were:

http://applepc.org/assets/system-6-pattern-2.png

I think if you clicked there like arrow buttons it cycled through the defaults. I don't remember them having any pattern that wasn't in MacPaint, though.

rjsw2• 2 years ago

Plus the Macintosh and GEM between the XEROX GUIs and X.

matttproud5• 2 years ago

Author here: Thanks for the hint! Do you have an image or two you can cite for this? I'd love to see a representative example of this.

cmiller12• 2 years ago

You can see it in this picture: https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-...

ogurechny• 2 years ago

Single color or tiled pattern wastes no system memory for background buffers. Color value or bitmap (actual bit map) was written directly to VRAM each time some region needed to be filled with background, and VRAM was the only component that needed to be big enough to hold the screen buffer. A single byte value or a couple of bytes was enough to define the whole background in the program.

Later, small tiled bitmaps (pix maps) were used for the same reasons to fill the screen. They were compact enough to fit somewhere in discardable free memory, and also to read from the disk with a single operation, which meant there was no benefit in keeping them in memory backed by swap file.

Some modern distributions use programmatic gradient generation for desktop background, though I am not sure whether it still works directly, or simply creates a temporary full screen image in memory, which is no different from using a regular photo.

thanatos519• 2 years ago

TL;DR: start Xorg with '-retro' for nostalgia!

ryandrake• 2 years ago

I wonder why they removed the stipple, just to add an opt-in to re-enable it. Was it causing problems with some newer hardware? I don't get why one would make such a deliberate change to a foundational piece of software if it was purely cosmetic.

kragen10• 2 years ago

probably because cosmetics aren't mere; they directly create pleasure or suffering

if tightvncserver is to be trusted, the new default is a solid gray, which i have to admit looks nicer. that doesn't seem optimal from the point of view of testability (for example, it'll look the same if your gamma is wrong, or if you've confused bgr with rgb, or used a tiled memory layout instead of the correct raster order or vice versa, though maybe not if you have a bit-plane layout or the wrong number of bits per pixel) which suggests that there was a different objective

bitwize3• 2 years ago

Because modern operating systems like macOS don't have it and it looks old. When it comes to GUIs -- modern good, old bad. This is actually borne out by psychological research in which users found more modern-looking UIs to be subjectively easier and more pleasant to use. It can be jarring to the end user if some component fails and that visually noisy 1bpp stipple shows up. A more modern, seamless experience is worth more than the frisson of nostalgia you get seeing your X server look exactly as it did in the 80s upon initialization.

ygra• 2 years ago

I do remember this to flicker horrendously on certain early LCD screens.

Joker_vD• 2 years ago

Because it looks horrendously moire if you twitch your head ever so slightly. I am, for one, very glad Ubuntu got rid of it so I don't have to damage my poor eyesight even further by ever having to look at it.

mjg592• 2 years ago

Display managers were starting the X server and then immediately drawing a background on top of it, which meant you saw the stipple for a fraction of a second and it was just kind of jarring. These days the X server commonly won't even draw its own background, it'll just inherit the boot framebuffer contents and then draw over them, so you go straight from boot splash to login prompt without flicker.

rjsw2• 2 years ago

My desktop has that stipple without using the '-retro' option, I guess it may be getting set by the window manager.

matttproud5• 2 years ago

You can use xsetroot on the bitmap file at any point later after startup.

technothrasher• 2 years ago

In the old days, it used to be that mouse, keyboard, video card, monitor, fonts, plugin+module data, etc. needed to be spelled out in detail in /etc/X11/XF86Config.

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.

zelos• 2 years ago

My feelings too: XF86Config is the new location, dammit.

drewg123• 2 years ago

Yes, it takes me back to configuring my X session for the first time on an NCD Xterminal in the computer lab at uni, connected to the schools's Sun and Dec servers. It was so much better than all the vt220 serial terminals, and they were "scary" enough that it was surprisingly easy to get one.

kragen10• 2 years ago

pretty funny to think that now people are scared of vt220 emulators

bitwize3• 2 years ago

Modern devs: X11 is bloated and obsolete

Also modern devs: Show HN: My proposal for a modern terminal that supports 24bit color, inline graphics, and video

kragen10• 2 years ago

i was surprised recently to find that tightvncserver didn't display this stipple and cursor when started up without any x-windows clients; now i know why. to me they bring back memories not of configuring xfree86 (which was easy since i didn't get my own computer until 01996 and didn't equip it with a leading-edge graphics card) but of using x-terminals at the university starting in 01992. the xdm login screen had the default stipple and x cursor

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:

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

but i'm not

matttproud5• 2 years ago

I'm older than I'd like to be. I felt like a fossil writing the article.

kragen10• 2 years ago

well, the alternative to being old is being dead

diydsp2• 2 years ago

To really stress it out, I would use both 0 to 1 and 1 to 0 transitions in the horizontal direction. Also, I would use a 2-on, 2-off pattern. e.g.

# # # .

# # . .

# . . .

# . # .

kragen10• 2 years ago

like this? http://canonical.org/~kragen/diydsp-stipple.png

it's slightly more ornamental than pure black or white, or just vertical lines or something, but it doesn't really seem aesthetically preferable to the old x boot stipple

pram• 2 years ago

Wow that Metro-X configurator is really nice. Messing with XFree on Slackware was a nightmare.

lizknope• 2 years ago

I remember setting multiple modelines and cycling through them with ctrl + alt + plus/minus

Then the monitor would freak out and start buzzing on the high resolution modeline that didn't quite work so you would switch away and go back to tweaking it.

It took me a while to get my first monitor to run at 1280x1024 @72Hz

I later had some Mitsubishi 21" monitors and got them to run at 2048x1536 @75Hz

My old desk still has a permanent bend to it from those two because they were so heavy.

nxobject• 2 years ago

Commerical X servers were really something, especially those without an academic/FOSS heritage. Desqview/X [1] was one of those "DOS plus a UI and multitasking" OSes that competed with Windows 2/3.x and GEOS/PC, that windowed with... you guess it, the power of Motif and X. I think twm was the original window manager that came with it, and you could run emulated DOS instances and Windows sessions in X terminal emulators.

[1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1...

giantrobot3• 2 years ago

A commercial X server was often worth the price of admission for a boxed copy of Rehat or SuSE. That and a copy of StarOffice. IIRC SuSE 6.x boxes came with a personal license for AcceleratedX and RedHat 5.x and 6.x came with MetroX licenses.

They still had XF86 available but I believe defaulted to the proprietary servers. Seeing the XF86Setup screenshot evoked bad memories of inscrutable setup sessions that I was always worried would burn out my monitor.

bitwize3• 2 years ago

The stipple pattern always reminded me of the pattern on Sun workstation mousepads. For those of you who don't remember: Sun workstations had optical mice, but they're not like the Intellimouse-derived ones we enjoy today that can track on any suitably textured surface, even your pant leg. They had to go on a special mousepad with a clear, slick glass or plastic surface and a special dot pattern underneath that the optosensor would use to reckon movement. I think even getting the upper surface dirty or fingerprinted could negatively mess with the tracking (like smudging a CD could affect playback).

drfuchs• 2 years ago

The Mouse Systems mouse used on Sun workstations had two LEDs (and matching sensors) of two different colors, and the solid mouse pad had vertical bars of one color ink, and horizontal of the other. You can take it from there.

Inventor / founder Steve Kirsch used some of the proceeds to fund Frame Technology, which then went on to be sold to Adobe. And then Infoseek (a search-engine also-ran), sold to Disney; and then Abaca (anti-spam), sold to Proofpoint.

ofrzeta• 2 years ago

That stipple background with the X cursor triggered many positive emotions. Like getting a remote X display to work. Another memory: Hummingbird X Server "eXceed" on Windows (NT I guess).

steve1977• 2 years ago

I remember eXceed being used in a bank I was working with. NT was used for the office stuff and the “big boy” trading applications were still mostly running on UNIX (mainly Solaris). With Windows 2000 a bit later, quite a few applications got ported to Windows IIRC.

ssl-34• 2 years ago

I remember using a 486 Linux box and eXceed to allow people to use Netscape over the LAN with X because it was a better experience that way than using any other method of using Netscape on our OS/2 Warp desktop machines at the shop.

(That little Linux box was the star of many shows. It also delivered our mail, routed our WAN, was our primary place to run IRC clients and news readers, and it served files.)

denton-scratch• 2 years ago

I used eXceed. Actually my boss wrote it; I worked for Hummingbird for a while.

kfogel• 2 years ago

That part about "...you wouldn’t want to wing it with the configuration, because allegedly you could break your monitor with a bad Monitor setting" -- strike the "allegedly"! Or at least, let me allege it from personal experience: I did that to one monitor, in the early 1990s. You could smell the fried electronics from across the room.

meatmanek• 2 years ago

I was briefly pleased with the ability to run an 8" monitor that looked like the kind on 90s cash registers at the impressively high resolution of 1024x768. Then after about 10 seconds it blinked out, smelled like burning electronics, and never worked again.

immibis2• 2 years ago

For the interested: CRT monitors have a high-voltage power supply which uses an oscillator. Cheap(er) monitors allegedly reused the horizontal sync frequency for the power supply oscillation, to save an oscillator, so if the horizontal sync frequency was very different from expected, or worse, completely stopped, it could burn out the HV power supply.

Has anyone tested this hypothesis? It could also be that the horizontal sync itself burns out, although that seems less likely.

(In even more detail: Like any other switching power supply, the HV supply in a CRT runs on a two-phase cycle: first, a coil, which creates electrical inertia, is connected to the power source, allowing current to build up. Then the current is suddenly shut off, and the force of the coil attempting to keep it flowing creates a very high voltage, which is harvested. If the circuit gets stuck in phase one, the current never stops increasing, until it's limited by the circuit's resistance, much higher than it's supposed to be. The excessively high current overheats and burns out the switching component. Anyone working on switching power supplies will have encountered this failure mode many times.)

disqard• 2 years ago

Your (parenthesized) explanation of switching power supplies made a lot of "secondhand knowledge" click in my head -- like, for instance, why there's lots of high-frequency noise in the DC output. Thank you!

dfox2• 2 years ago

It is not really about saving one oscillator, but about two things:

- saving the drive circuitry for the flyback, which is usually combined with horizontal deflection amplifier. Also such a design probably simplifies the output filter for horizontal deflection as the flyback primary is part of that filter.

- synchronizing the main PSU of the display to the horizontal sync as to make various interference artifacts in the image stay in place instead of slowly vandering around, which will make them more distracting and noticable.

It is not that hard to see the whole CRT monitor as essentially being one giant SMPS that produces bunch of really weird voltages with weird waveforms. And in fact is you take apart mid-90's CRT display (without OSD), the actual video circuitry is one IC, few passives and lot of overvoltage protection, rest of the thing is powersupply and the deflection drivers (which are kind of also an power supply, as the required currents are significant).

satori99• 2 years ago

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon made reference to a hacker dubbed The Digi-Bomber, as he could make his victims CRT monitors implode in front of them by remotely forcing a dangerously bad configuration.

hawski• 2 years ago

That reminds me of using a CRT monitor to broadcast audio through radio waves: http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/

throwaway_24942• 2 years ago

I fondly remember programming my own higher resolution graphics modes via X86Config.

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...)

derefr7• 2 years ago

For a long time the X Window System had a reputation for being difficult to configure. In retrospect, I’m not 100% sure why it earned this reputation, because the configuration file format, which is plain text, has remained essentially the same since I started using Linux in the mid-1990s.

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.)

throwaway_24942• 2 years ago

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.

You didn't have to guess, you just had to read the specs in the manual that came with your equipment.

xenophonf• 2 years ago

Those specs weren't readily available to non-experts, never mind what to do with them.

For a trip down memory lane, read through the XFree86 Video Timings HOWTO (https://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/index.htm...). Getting stuff to work in the Good Old Days was _not_ easy.

robinsonb56• 2 years ago

The manual that came with your laptop of 25 years ago isn't going to tell you whether your touchpad is Alps or Synaptic, or which PS/2 protocol it imitates.

giantrobot3• 2 years ago

You didn't have to guess, you just had to read the specs in the manual that didn't come with your equipment.

Hey you missed a word so I added it in for you. Most consumer PC equipment definitely did not come with any documentation covering the sort of stuff X's config file was asking about.

When that documentation was available it was something you could only get by contacting the manufacturer about. But you couldn't mention the word "Linux" because the CS rep would give a blanket "we don't support Linux" and you'd get nothing.

jagger27• 2 years ago

Just RTFM

Ahh Linux people. Some things will never change.

blueflow• 2 years ago

To the people down-voting you: X is from a time when devices actually came with manuals. When the people using it were engineers and scientists and reading a datasheet or a manual was a normal thing to them.

I think this started around the 90ies that devices turned into magic black box consumables that are expected to "just work" while being undiagnosable when they don't.

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

Modelines required timing information that was rarely available. You made a best guess and tweaked the numbers until it worked.

babypuncher• 2 years ago

That's already more work than other operating systems of the late '90s made you do to get a functioning mouse, keyboard, and display.

Asooka• 2 years ago

lol

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                    |____________________M-K

LMFAO

derefr7• 2 years ago

Lucky you, buying computer hardware new-in-box :)

I think, for at least the first 30 years of my life, every Linux system I've ever built was with "hand-me-down" hardware. First hardware from my parents, then from various friends, then finally from my own expired projects.

When I was young (eleven!), this meant that we'd get a new computer, and now the very old computer it replaced could be repurposed as a "playground" for me to try various things — like installing Linux on — rather than throwing it out. (My first Linux install was Slackware 3.4 on a Pentium 166 machine. Not the best hardware for 1998!) Nary a manual in sight; of course my parents didn't keep those, especially for something like a monitor.

When I was a teenager, this meant getting hand-me-down hardware from friends who had taken the parts out of their own machines as they upgraded them. Never thought to ask for manuals, of course. (Also, sometimes I just found things like monitors laying on the side of the road — and my existing stuff was so old that this "junk" was an upgrade!)

And during my early adulthood, my "main rig" was almost always a Windows or (Hackintoshed) macOS machine. So it was still the "residue" of parts that left that rig as it got upgraded, that came together to form a weird little secondary Linux system. (So I could have kept the manuals at this point; but by then, the manuals weren't needed any more, as everything did become more PnP.)

It's only very recently that I bought a machine just to throw Linux on it. (Mostly because I wanted to replace my loud, power-sucking Frankenstein box, with one of those silent little NUC-like boxes you can find on Amazon that have an AMD APU in them, so I could just throw it into my entertainment center.) And funny enough... this thing didn't come with a manual, or even a (good) data-sheet! (Which is okay for HDMI these days, but meant that it was pretty hard to determine e.g. how many PCIe lanes the two M.2 slots on the board are collectively allocated.)

robinsonb56• 2 years ago

Yup, things are so much better now that they just work. Except when they don't, because now it's harder to do anything about it.

I've lost count of the number of Linux machines I've seen that won't offer the correct resolution for a particular monitor (typically locked to 1024x768 on a widescreen monitor).

I don't know whether the problem's with Linux, Xorg, crappy BIOSes or crappy monitors - but even now I occasionally resort to an xorg.conf file to solve such issues.

jandrese6• 2 years ago

Do you work with a lot of KVMs? Directly plugged monitors usually just work thanks to EDID info, but cheap KVMs frequently block that signal and cause problems. It's rare for a monitor plugged directly into the computer to have problems these days, even on Linux.

LtWorf5• 2 years ago

I've seen that won't offer the correct resolution for a particular monitor (typically locked to 1024x768 on a widescreen monitor).

I've been using linux for over 20 years, Xorg for most of that time, and I've never had any issues with screen resolution.

maximilianburke• 2 years ago

It was always fun to have the threat of overdriving and frying your CRT monitor hanging over your head when trying to get X going.

halyconWays• 2 years ago

You surfaced memories of childhood me installing RedHat 5.2, carefully selecting packages and X config options, getting it wrong, not knowing how to get back to that magical installation UI, and reinstalling the OS just to have another crack at it.

Eventually I figured out how to launch that xconfig utility and found some sane defaults, and was thrilled when I finally saw the stippling pattern or even a window manager.

doctor_eval• 2 years ago

For a long time the X Window System had a reputation for being difficult to configure.

Honestly I thought it was hard to configure because until I used Linux, my X terminals didn’t need to be configured at all!

I may be misremembering but I think my NCD terminal used bootp and probably a little tftp, then off it went. The hardest part was probably finding an Ethernet drop to plug it into.

Now - get off my lawn!

msk-lywenn2• 2 years ago

I did break a beautiful compaq 21" CRT by setting an unconventional modeline to play gradius in mame in its original resolution. It was glorious. But it dropped a big brown screen from time to time. Until I understood why/when it turned brown. But it was too late.

brcmthrowaway• 2 years ago

Wait CRTs can be bricked?

msk-lywenn2• 2 years ago

A modeline is not like reprogramming a firmware or anything, it’s just settings on how to move the electron beam. I don’t know what I did, but it probably moved too far or something, It wouldn’t show anything else but brown

linksnapzz• 2 years ago

Yes; trying to drive a refresh rate higher than what’s rated can do it-I think it had something to do with the flyback transformer? Some (later) crts had guards against this, and ddc more ore less prevented it.

evmar• 2 years ago

In the early ChromeOS days when they were thinking about which graphics stack to use, the quiet but definitive top manager said, if they picked X11, that he'd better not see any stipple on boot. It's such a funny comment that stayed with me because it really captures how seeing that stipple is such a symbol of "I guess you're booting X11 now", and his insight on how it's not what he wanted the first impression of the product to be.

jeffrallen• 2 years ago

Sun 4c crowd represent! Pop up X windows over from jarthur, a 32 way SMP machine using 386's in order to cover up some of that sweet stipple action. Retro, indeed!

jhfdbkofdchk• 2 years ago

jarthur, now that is a name I have not heard in a long time…

sctb• 2 years ago

As a youngster, the first time I managed to get Slackware installed via floppies, I was having a great time chatting with ircII and browsing with lynx. Someone on IRC told me I needed X Windows and I was like, that sounds cool, so I learned as much as I could to try to get a working config with my video card. Many hours later I got startx to take over the screen and now I'm staring at the stipple and X cursor.

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.

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

In the very early 90s, my dad started using some sort of unix again (I don't know if it was an early linux or a BSD of some sort.) Up until that point, I'd only ever seen him used windows 3.1 or some raw terminal/TTY emulator.

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.

worik• 2 years ago

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.

Yes

Taste, it is a subjective thing

That's why I loved it

drooopy• 2 years ago

The stipple and X cursor are forever ingrained into my memories. I remember it so vividly how back in 1998 when I installed my first Linux distro (suse 6-ish) and after some configuring i typed "startx" and then BOOM! Grey "unix-y" weirdness for a minute or two and then KDE 1. It will never not hit me with immense levels of nostalgia whenever I come across it, which admittedly is not very often these days.

jaxr• 2 years ago

Wow, I could have written that exact comment myself. Those were the happy startx, after you got the monitor sync rates right. The myth went that if you got them wrong, you could fry the monitor. I remember that suse package came with a couple of pins. one tux and one suse chameleon. I preserved them for a long time. But I moved way too many times. Fun times. Thanks for the nostalgia:)

colanderman• 2 years ago

Saw the stipple just last week on a (presumably) failed startup of an airplane's seat back entertainment system. Not the X cursor but the normal X11 arrow. Recognized it immediately and was, in my own way, entertained.

ForOldHack• 2 years ago

"Did your blood pressure raise looking at that?

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.

ben7799• 2 years ago

Wow this one hit me with major nostalgia.

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.

frithsun• 2 years ago

Holding my first child for the first time decades later approached the sense of otherworldly bliss and joy that I experienced when, as a young teen in the mid nineties, I got X to work on my 486.

Izkata• 2 years ago

If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex:
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.

somat• 2 years ago

My understanding is the root weave is a pattern designed to be hard on your monitor(a crt when it was designed). It is ugly as sin but that tight flip from black to white was intended to expose any weakness in the driving beam, ether from misconfiguration or components failing. Where another pattern may obscure the problem. I think it is also rough on lcd's where a misbehaving one really sparkles on the weave.

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.

pimeys• 2 years ago

I started usinc Linux around the same time with RedHat 5.0. I do remember that even with Metro getting the X server running was not super easy and took me a few weeks and a few trips to the library to finally have a working GUI.

Oh man good times.

mjg592• 2 years ago

"So knowing now that root weave and all of that is from 1986, should I send X.Org a pull request to rename the party_like_its_1989 global variable to party_like_its_1986 or party_like_the_1980s"

Well, that would kind of spoil the Prince reference

aunwick• 2 years ago

I remember looking at that screen wondering if my mouse was going to work this time...

lottin• 2 years ago

This reminds me of the first time I ran the X Window System on my computer. After one hour trying to start X unsuccessfully, I finally got the stipple background, which left me wondering what was the next step. There was no next step. I right-clicked on the background and a menu popped up. That was it. That was X, before my very eyes, in all its splendour.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

saw those images and could smell the stale cigarette smoke on warm bakelite and hear the whine of a vga x terminal monitor with its refresh rate set too high. thinking about sending an xroach -display to the punk who portscanned me and cluttered my logs while leaving his display open. dumb enough to forget to set an xhosts file means dumb enough to panic when he saw the bugs...

phire• 2 years ago

It also turns out that Windows 3.1 (maybe even Windows 3.0 if memory serves) had a bitmap-style background pattern feature that included a pattern composition tool.

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".

papaver-somnamb• 2 years ago

That stippled background, and particularly with the X mouse cursor, brings back memories of long waits for X to start. New software updates were always exciting because they promised newer, more interesting graphics that showcased the capabilities of the hardware. Cooler icons! Motif! New ideas! And new hardware updates were even more exciting because they were expensive to get a hold of and highly anticipated. Faster drawing speed! Better resolution! Higher color depths! You could tell on a human scale how much faster the new hardware was and where your money went.

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.

cesaref• 2 years ago

I think all the early B&W windowing systems had a stipple, as otherwise you are limited to either black or white which is pretty grim as a background.

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

dfox2• 2 years ago

So why did the stipple go away? I’m not terribly certain to be honest [...]

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.

hulitu3• 2 years ago

For a long time the X Window System had a reputation for being difficult to configure.

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

Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

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