Don Hopkins personal blog
X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
- Points
- 206
- HN comments
- 296
- Submissions
- 2
- Cited by
- 12 commenters
History & Retro ComputingSystems & Performance2017
On Hacker News
| Submitted | Title on HN | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 17, 2017 | X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster by handpickednames | 206 | 136 |
| Mar 5, 2020 | The X-Windows Disaster (1994) by shp0ngle | 105 | 160 |
Cited in comments
Linked from 25 Hacker News comments by 12 different people, from Sep 2009 to Jun 2025.
Most recent:
- DonHopkins · Jun 25, 2025
- kragen · Jun 21, 2024
- DonHopkins · Apr 19, 2023
- SllX · Jan 11, 2021
- jacquesm · Sep 19, 2020
- zxcmx · Jun 17, 2020
