7 The X-Windows Disaster How to Make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which fol- lowed the same principles—but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. —Marcus J. Ranum Digital Equipment Corporation 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. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race condi- tions, and promulgated double standards. X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats—like Sun’s Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility con- sumes 656K to run. And X’s memory usage is increasing.