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saghm • last Friday at 1:42 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

In the same vein, my recollection is reading that the X windowing system is called X because it's the letter after "W", which was the original choice (because it's what the word "window" starts with), but it was already taken, so they went with X.

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anyfoo • last Friday at 1:57 AM

It looks like X was deliberately chosen to denote succession of W, not clashing with it:

    "The name X derives from the lineage of the system. At Stanford University, Paul Asente and Brian Reid had begun work on the W window system [3] as an alternative to VGTS [13, 221 for the V system [5]. [...] We acquired a UNIX-based version of W for the VSlOO (with synchronous communication over TCP[24] produced by Asente and Chris Kent at Digital’s Western Research Laboratory. [...] It was also clear that, although synchronous communication was perhaps acceptable in the V system (owing to very fast networking primitives), it was completely inadequate in most other operating environments. X is our “reaction” to W."
-- https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/22949.24053
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